HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-09-07T11:53:04.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/people/charles-i/feed/atom Catherine Curzon <![CDATA[From Nell Gwyn to Meghan Markle: 9 romances between actors and royals]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/nell-gwyn-meghan-markle-harry-relationships-actors-royals/ 2026-09-07T11:53:04.000Z 2026-09-07T11:52:56.000Z On 19 May 2018, Meghan Markle married into the British royal family when she tied the knot with Prince Harry at Windsor Castle.

The couple – now the Duke and Duchess of Sussex – have rarely been out of the headlines in the intervening years, and recently found themselves at the centre of a tabloid storm when it was revealed that they would be returning to the UK with their two children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, having set up home in the United States in 2020.

Meanwhile, rumours are also circulating that the Duchess of Sussex is exploring a return to acting – a career that, to some, seemed incompatible with the traditional expectations of a royal bride. Yet Harry and Meghan’s relationship is merely the latest in a long line of romances between royals and members of the acting profession.

Below, historian Catherine Curzon examines nine other relationships, spanning the 17th century to the present day…

1. Margaret ‘Peg’ Hughes and Prince Rupert of the Rhine

Better known as Peg, Margaret Hughes (c1630–1719) holds the distinction of being one of the first recorded female actors to grace the London stage, appearing as Desdemona in Shakespeare’s Othello on 8 December 1660 at the Vere Street Theatre.

Up until this point, women had been forbidden to act on stage at all, and it wasn’t until King Charles II issued a royal warrant declaring that female roles must be played by women in 1662 that female actors became a common sight, as opposed to young men dressed up to look like them.

Peg was no young man, though, and she not only bewitched her audience but managed to steal the heart of Rupert of the Rhine, cousin to Charles II.

After Rupert’s death in 1682, Peg gambled away much of his bequest to her and sold off many valuables, including a necklace that was bought by the infamous Nell Gwyn (see below). Peg died in 1719, having never regained the lifestyle she once enjoyed.

2. Nell Gwyn and King Charles II

Perhaps the most famous of all England’s royal mistresses, Nell Gwyn (1650–87) began her career selling oranges to the patrons of a theatre on London’s Brydges Street, Charles II’s royal playhouse. By the time she was 14 years old, Nell was treading the boards as an actor and she found her niche as a leading light of Restoration comedy, soon becoming one of London’s most celebrated comedians.

George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham was unofficially appointed to arrange suitably impressive lovers for Nell. Seeing a chance to increase his own influence as well as her cachet, he attempted to install her as the king’s mistress. Though Charles was married to Catherine of Braganza, the queen had long since learned to put up with his many mistresses, recognising them as a fact of royal life.

• Read more | Was Charles II too randy to rule?

Nell was amenable to the duke’s scheme, but informed him that she expected a retainer of £500 a year for the privilege. However, the role of king’s mistress was a privileged one, filled with luxury and opulence, and Charles had plenty of willing candidates to choose from – even without paying them £500. When he heard the figure Nell was demanding, Charles rejected the idea, but when he met her in 1668, he was smitten.

Despite plenty of rivals and other mistresses snapping at her heels, Nell bore two children by the king. The actor and the monarch were a couple until his death in 1685, often sharing Nell’s silver bed, upon which the couple’s images were engraved. On his deathbed, the king begged “let not poor Nelly starve”, and she certainly didn’t. Awarded a substantial payment, she lived on for two more years before she succumbed to a stroke, possibly the result of syphilis.

3. Mary ‘Perdita’ Robinson and King George IV

Mary Robinson (1757–1800) knew all about reinvention. When her father abandoned his family in 1764, Mary’s privileged childhood ended with a bump. Married in her teens, she survived a spell in debtor’s prison thanks to her dissolute husband and took to the stage in need of cash.

Mary became known for her so-called ‘breeches roles’, in which she played men and flashed her famed legs, a part of the female anatomy that wasn’t often on display in the Georgian era. It was as Perdita in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale that she caught the eye of the young and capricious George, Prince of Wales, the future King George IV.

• Read more | 16 of the worst monarchs in history

The prince offered Mary a huge payment if she gave up the stage to become his official mistress and she accepted. However, the money was not forthcoming, and soon he had moved on to new lovers, leaving Mary high and dry. With her reputation in tatters, Mary took up her pen and began a new career as a poet and novelist, earning herself the nickname ‘the English Sappho’.

Partially paralysed by a later illness, Mary died in 1800 aged just 43.

4. Dorothea Jordan and King William IV

While Prince George was romancing Mary, his younger brother William (the future William IV) made a play for Dorothea ‘Dora’ Jordan (1761–1816), a celebrated Anglo-Irish comedian with a long list of lovers in her past. William and Dora lived together as man and wife for 20 years and had 10 children.

However, the couple never married and – with Princess Charlotte of Wales likely to remain the only child of his elder brother and his bitterly estranged wife – William found himself closer to the throne than he had ever expected to be. Perhaps more importantly, William was desperately in need of money to settle his debts and knew that an official marriage might do wonders for his allowance.

He dropped Dora with a bump and promised her an annuity and custody of their daughters on the understanding that she wouldn’t go back to the stage. Unfortunately, when her financial situation led Dora to return to the theatre, William kept his word. He took the girls from her care and slashed her allowance accordingly.

Dora died in poverty in 1816 and left a heartbroken William to rue his decision. Ironically, even when he later made an official marriage, he and his wife, Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, failed to produce any surviving heirs.

5. Marguerite Bellanger and Emperor Napoleon III

Marguerite Bellanger (1838–86) was born into abject poverty but thanks to a modicum of acting talent and a whole lot of charm, she wouldn’t stay there. She started her performance career as an acrobat and equestrienne and soon progressed to acting, while establishing herself as one of the most popular courtesans in Paris.

Marguerite’s most famous patron was undoubtedly Napoleon III (the nephew of Napoleon I), whom she met while sheltering from the rain in Paris’s Parc de Saint-Cloud in 1863. From that romantic beginning, the couple were together for a decade until his death and they had a son. Though Marguerite still had other lovers, Napoleon awarded her a generous pension and even a castle in which she and his son could live.

After Napoleon’s death in 1873, Marguerite moved to England and married an army officer. The couple eventually settled in France and it was there, in 1886, that she died.

6. Lillie Langtry and King Edward VII

Anglo-American music hall star Lillie Langtry (1853–1929) was a bona fide megastar of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, and she had a love life that would keep any modern tabloid in material for years. As one of many mistresses of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII), Lillie was even presented to his mother Queen Victoria. During their three-year relationship, Lillie was happy to share her lover with both his wife and his other mistresses, seeming to enjoy not being tied exclusively to the prince.

• Read more | A timeline of Britain in the reign of Edward VII

Though the couple separated amicably, Edward wasn’t Lillie’s last royal fling. While still in a relationship with the Prince of Wales, she fell pregnant by Prince Louis of Battenberg (1854–1921). He was the son of Prince Alexander of Hesse and had been naturalised as a Briton, eventually changing his name to Mountbatten.

Louis was a member of the Royal Navy, so when news of the pregnancy came out, the horrified Prince Alexander had his son sent to sea aboard HMS Inconstant. The Prince of Wales, meanwhile, paid for Lillie to spend her pregnancy in Paris, where she gave birth to a daughter.

Lillie died in 1929 and to this day her name remains synonymous with the glory days of the British music hall.

7. Rita Hayworth and Prince Aly Khan

In 1949, Rita Hayworth (1918–87), one of Hollywood’s most popular and celebrated actors, gave up the silver screen for life as the wife of Prince Aly Khan. The prince was the son of Sultan Mahommed Shah, Aga Khan III, the hereditary imam of the Nizari Ismailis, one of the largest Shia Muslim communities in the world.

Sadly for Rita, her new husband had a weakness for actors and two years later he was back in the very club where he and his princess first met, this time romancing Hollywood star Joan Fontaine. Rita took their daughter, Yasmin, and filed for divorce, convinced that Aly Khan would abduct the little girl if she wasn’t kept under guard.

The couple’s divorce was a tabloid favourite: as lawyers argued over whether Yasmin should be raised as a Christian or a Muslim, she played in the courtroom and even settled on the judge’s lap. Ultimately the court found in Rita’s favour, and she was awarded custody of her daughter.

8. Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III of Monaco

As Hollywood royalty, Grace Kelly (1929–82) was beloved by cinemagoers across the world. Having earned an Academy Award for her performance in The Country Girl (1954) and starred in hits from High Noon (1952) to Rear Window (1954), it seemed the perfect fairy-tale ending when she married Prince Rainier III of Monaco in 1956.

• Read more | Historians at the movies: Grace of Monaco reviewed

In fact, Princess Grace’s life was anything but a fairy tale. Her marriage at the age of 26 marked the end of her Hollywood career. She was forced to turn down the title role in Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Marnie (1964) when the people of Monaco reacted with outrage to the idea of their princess playing a criminal. Further rumoured returns to the screen were similarly rejected as a result of Rainier’s wish for his wife to remain in professional retirement.

Instead, Grace dedicated herself to philanthropy and her three children. She also struck up a friendship with Diana, Princess of Wales. Sadly, Grace died at the age of 52 as a result of a car accident in 1982.

9. Clotilde Courau and Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, Prince of Venice

In 2003, Vittorio Emanuele, Prince of Naples, reportedly had to swallow his pride when his son, Emanuele Filiberto, married the politically outspoken left-wing French actor Clotilde Courau (born 1969).

Courau had once been described by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica as “a militant anarcho-Communist” – making her an unconventional choice of bride for the grandson of Italy’s last reigning king, Umberto II.

Unlike many of the other stars on this list, Clotilde refused to give up her career after marrying into royalty and continued to act, while also pursuing charitable activities under her official title, Clotilde of Savoy.

The couple had two daughters together before announcing that they had begun formal divorce proceedings in April 2026.

An older version of this article was first published by HistoryExtra in May 2018

]]> James Osborne <![CDATA[The ultimate Cold War sex scandal – and 11 other political outrages from British history]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-ultimate-cold-war-sex-scandal-and-11-other-political-outrages-from-british-history/ 2026-05-17T14:30:04.000Z 2026-05-17T14:30:01.000Z The first English parliaments were intended as countermeasures to bad kingship, protecting the realm from the worst excesses of rogue royals.

From these medieval beginnings, and through its evolution into the modern parliament of the United Kingdom, the institution has spread across the world as a model of representative government and as a symbol of democracy. But that doesn’t mean that it has been without controversy.

Since its inception, parliament has been dogged by scandals that have affected its reputation and altered its procedures. But which episodes have had the most lasting influence and infamy – and why? James Osborne investigates…

1. Alice Perrers and the Good Parliament (1376)

By the start of the 1370s, King Edward III had ruled England for nearly half a century. He was a transformative monarch who had taken the country into the Hundred Years’ War with France. But age and illness had left him diminished, and he had withdrawn from day-to-day rule. Filling that vacuum of power were the king’s courtiers and confidants, including Alice Perrers.

Perrers had risen from relatively modest origins to become the king’s closest companion after the death of Queen Philippa. She was ever-present at court, decorated with jewels belonging to the crown. She had accumulated lands, wealth and influence on a scale that positioned her as one of the most powerful women in England. Both in appearance and power, she had assumed the role of a pseudo-queen.

Chroniclers accused her of inserting herself where she didn’t belong, interrupting legal proceedings and persuading the king to reward her allies. Whether these claims were true (or an instance of medieval misogyny) didn’t matter. The perception was that royal power was being manipulated for personal gain.

When parliament met in 1376, the long war with France was going badly, taxes were high and confidence in the royal household had collapsed. With Edward III’s power eroded, this assembly (later known as the Good Parliament) was able to be unusually assertive. Alice Perrers quickly became its central target.

MPs accused her of using her sexual relationship with the king to enrich herself, distort justice and dominate access to royal favour. Parliament forced Perrers to swear an oath to never again approach the king, stripped her of property, and removed her from court.

But within a few months, Perrers had returned, protected by the king and his allies, and many of the reforms of the Good Parliament were undone. It wasn’t until Edward’s death in 1377 that Perrers was tried for corruption and subsequently exiled.

The episode marked parliament’s growing confidence in naming, shaming and punishing abuses of power – even when those abuses were entangled with sexual politics and the private life of the crown.

2. The fall of Thomas Cromwell (1540)

In the mid-16th century, during the apogee of Tudor England, Thomas Cromwell was second only to Henry VIII as the most powerful man in the realm.

The son of a blacksmith, Cromwell had risen from simple origins, elevating himself with a combination of fierce intelligence, canny administrative skill and absolute loyalty to the king. He was the architect of the English Reformation, the man who used parliament to break with the pope, dissolve the monasteries, and place the king at the head of the Church of England.

But by tying himself so closely to the king, Cromwell’s power was predicated on his patron’s favour. When Henry’s fourth marriage, to Anne of Cleves, proved a humiliating failure, Cromwell was blamed. It proved disastrous: his numerous enemies at court seized the moment, assembling accusations of treason and heresy.

Cromwell was arrested in June 1540, stripped of office, and executed a month later on Tower Hill. The man who had expanded parliament’s authority was killed by the same institution, at the king’s behest. Later generations would look back on cases like Cromwell’s as examples of how parliamentary power could be abused, and why limits on that power were necessary.

3. The ship money crisis (1630s)

The second Stuart king, Charles I, deemed parliament a nuisance. He dissolved it in 1629 and chose to govern without it. This period, later dubbed the ‘Personal Rule’, lasted 11 years. This wasn’t illegal in itself – and parliaments were only called periodically anyway – but it created a practical problem: war, government and the royal court all required money. But taxes were meant to be raised only with parliament’s approval.

So, Charles and his advisers turned to older forms of revenue that didn’t require parliamentary assent. The most controversial was ‘ship money’, a levy traditionally raised from coastal towns to fund naval defence in emergencies. In the 1630s, the crown extended ship money across the country and began demanding it in peacetime.

In effect, this was a tax by another name, imposed without parliament’s consent. Ship money wasn’t the largest source of royal income, but it did become the clearest example of royal overreach.

When Charles later faced rebellion in Scotland and needed funds for an army, he was forced to recall parliament in 1640 – which was now an assembly brimming with pent-up anger. In the long term, the scandal became part of the chain of events that led to civil war.

4. The South Sea Bubble (1720)

The South Sea Company was founded in 1711. A joint-stock company, it took on government debt in return for guaranteed interest payments, and in 1713 secured a significant contract to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish South America. This was one of many examples of complex arrangements between government and private companies, as the state sought to deal with the heavy burden of debt accumulated from protracted wars.

In 1719, the company proposed a new and ambitious scheme. It would absorb a large portion of the national debt, and in return, it would offer its shares as a route to great wealth. Parliament approved the plan, and ministers, MPs and members of the royal family were given shares on favourable terms.

The value of the company’s shares rose rapidly, driven by hype rather than financial stability or impressive profits. Similar opportunist ventures quickly popped up, many with no serious business behind them. Ordinary investors, encouraged by the involvement of political leaders, poured their savings into the schemes. By the summer of 1720, the bubble burst and prices collapsed, ruining the finances of thousands who had become involved.

Against a backdrop of intense public anger, parliament was forced to act against its own members who had accepted bribes in the form of shares and loans, or unscrupulously promoted legislation from which they stood to profit directly. Several politicians were expelled or otherwise left in disgrace.

One figure who emerged strengthened was Robert Walpole, who helped stabilise the system and limit the fallout. He would later become Britain’s first prime minister.

• Read more | The South Sea Bubble: when was it formed and what happened?

5. The Wilkes affair (1763–74)

As the Georgian era progressed, Britain was becoming a more politically engaged society. With growing press freedoms, newspapers had taken on a new and important role, and elections were becoming fiercely contested. Parliament was no longer such a distant institution.

John Wilkes benefited from these changes. He was a journalist, pamphleteer and MP who made his name by attacking the government in print.

Wilkes was elected to parliament in 1757, and within a few years he had become a sharp critic of the ministry and of George III’s advisers. In 1763 his newspaper, The North Briton, published an issue accusing the king’s speech to parliament of being deliberately misleading.

Fearing the damage he might cause to royal reputations, the government responded by issuing a general warrant for Wilkes’s arrest. Wilkes was imprisoned, but successfully argued that as an MP he was protected by parliamentary privilege. He was released and became a public cause célèbre.

The conflict between Wilkes and the government escalated when he fled abroad and was convicted of obscene and seditious libel in absentia.

On his return, he was repeatedly elected as MP for Middlesex. Each time, the House of Commons expelled him. At one point, parliament declared his defeated opponent the winner of the election, despite Wilkes having the most votes. The affair dragged on, but, eventually, parliament retreated. Wilkes was allowed to take his seat in 1774.

Wilkes’s name became a shorthand for a wider series of demands: freedom of the press, fair elections and limits on parliamentary privileges.

6. The Duchess of Kingston’s bigamy trial (1776)

For much of its history, parliament acted in certain cases as a court. Members of the peerage could only be tried by the House of Lords. This placed some of the most private and scandalous disputes of elite life at the centre of public politics – including the trial of Elizabeth Chudleigh in 1776.

Elizabeth Chudleigh had built a reputation as one of the most flamboyant figures of Georgian high society. She served as a maid of honour at court, cultivated powerful patrons, and was well known for her conspicuous wealth and independence. In 1769 she married Evelyn Pierrepont, Duke of Kingston, only enhancing her status further.

But after the duke’s death in 1773, questions were raised about whether the marriage had been legal. In 1744, Chudleigh had secretly married a naval officer, Augustus Hervey. The marriage was poorly documented and later disputed, but it had never been formally dissolved. If it was valid, her later marriage to the Duke of Kingston would have amounted to bigamy – a serious criminal offence.

Because she was now a duchess, the case was heard in the House of Lords, and the trial became a public spectacle. The personal life of a prominent woman was dissected in full view of parliament, attracting enormous public interest and extensive press coverage.

The Lords found Chudleigh guilty. She was spared imprisonment but stripped of her title.

7. The Charles Dilke affair (1885–86)

Toward the final decades of Queen Victoria’s long reign, Britain’s political system was becoming more democratic, but it remained shaped by Victorian ideas about morality and respectability. Public figures were expected to embody private virtue, as well as public service.

Charles Dilke was a wealthy Radical Liberal MP, first elected in his mid-twenties and widely regarded as a future prime minister. He supported republican ideas, social reform, and the expansion of the franchise. By the mid-1880s he was president of the Local Government Board and one of the most recognisable faces in British politics.

But Dilke’s highest political ambitions were derailed by allegations that surfaced in Donald Crawford’s 1885 divorce petition against his wife, Virginia. The scandal became public at the first hearing of Crawford v Crawford and Dilke on 12 February 1886, when Donald Crawford told the court (repeating a confession Virginia had made to him in July 1885) that she had committed adultery with Dilke and described lurid “French vices”, including an allegation that Dilke involved her in a ménage-à-trois.

Although the judge dismissed the case against Dilke for lack of evidence while granting Crawford a divorce, press and political pressure made this an inadequate vindication for Dilke. Seeking to clear his name, Dilke helped trigger a second hearing in July 1886, in which further explicit testimony and admissions proved disastrous for him.

The MP lost his seat in the general election that same month, and although he re-entered parliament in 1892, Dilke’s political career never fully recovered.

8. The Marconi scandal (1912–13)

The Marconi scandal centred on a government contract to build a chain of wireless telegraphy stations across the British empire.

The contract was awarded to the British subsidiary of the Marconi Company, a firm at the forefront of a new and strategically important technology. But not long after the decision, questions were raised in parliament about whether ministers had financial interests connected to the deal.

It emerged that several senior figures in the Liberal government, including the chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, the attorney general Sir Rufus Isaacs and the postmaster general Herbert Samuel, had bought shares in the American Marconi Company. Although this was a separate business from the British subsidiary that received the contract, the distinction was subtle, and widely misunderstood. Opposition MPs accused ministers of insider trading and misleading parliament and, thanks to interest from the press, the issue became a prolonged public controversy.

As for the fallout, Professor Nicholas Allen of Royal Holloway University of London tells HistoryExtra, “Lloyd George obviously survived Marconi after a (perceived friendly) select committee inquiry, and, indeed, went on to prosper!”

• Read more | 6 shocking presidential scandals that rocked the White House: from the Petticoat Affair to Clinton-Lewinsky

9. Cash for honours (1916–22)

During the First World War and its immediate aftermath, Britain was governed by a coalition led by David Lloyd George, a forceful and unconventional prime minister. Lloyd George relied heavily on political fundraising to maintain his position, particularly after the war.

For many years, honours such as knighthoods and peerages had been influenced by political service and donation. Under Lloyd George, this informal system evolved into something altogether more formal. Wealthy individuals were invited to make large contributions to party funds with the clear expectation that an honour would follow: a knighthood for thousands of pounds, a peerage for a sizeable sum more.

The practice was an open secret in political circles, but it came to the attention of the public after Lloyd George left office in 1922. Former associates and journalists published details of the dealings, including lists of honours that appeared to match donations with suspicious precision. The idea that seats in the House of Lords could effectively be bought by the wealthy created widespread public anger.

The scandal damaged trust in the honours system and reinforced perceptions of postwar politics as cynical and corrupt, though Lloyd George managed to avoid any formal consequences – the second time he dodged punishment for a scandal within the space of a few years.

The wider impact has also been limited, according to Professor Allen. “Cash for honours led to legislation that made explicit sales illegal. But, of course, the correlation between party donations and honours has continued ever since.”

10. Hugh Dalton’s accidental budget leak (1947)

Hugh Dalton was chancellor of the Exchequer in the postwar Labour government led by Clement Attlee. Dalton was an experienced figure, a key architect of Labour’s economic policy and the expansion of the welfare state.

On 12 November 1947, he arrived at the House of Commons to deliver his latest budget. While waiting outside the chamber, Dalton chatted briefly to a journalist and mentioned a small detail of the forthcoming budget: a proposed increase in the rate of purchase tax.

Working quickly, the journalist was able to rush from parliament and publish the information almost immediately. As a result, a detail from the budget appeared in print before Dalton had even finished presenting it to parliament.

The next day, Dalton resigned – though this was only a “formal resignation”, according to Professor Allen, who says that, in reality, the chancellor was “swiftly sacked by Attlee”.

There wasn’t any suggestion of personal gain, corruption or deception. Dalton’s only mistake had been to unintentionally break the convention that parliament should be the first recipient of major financial information from the government – but it was a fatal mistake.

Surely one of the strangest and most arcane scandals in parliamentary history, Professor Allen says that Dalton’s downfall “was more of an executive failing. Though, of course, Dalton re-entered government later in Labour’s term.”

11. The Profumo affair (1963)

John Profumo was the secretary of state for war in the Conservative government led by Harold Macmillan.

Profumo was seen as a reliable figure in a sensitive defence role during the peak of Cold War tensions. Profumo was married, but in 1961 he began a brief sexual relationship with Christine Keeler, a 19-year-old model and showgirl connected to social circles that included prominent diplomats and figures within the intelligence community.

But Profumo wasn’t Keeler’s only romantic liaison. Keeler was also intimately acquainted with Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché widely believed to be an intelligence officer working for the Soviet Union. At the height of the Cold War, the possibility that a prominent cabinet minister – and the secretary of state for war, no less – might have shared a lover with a Soviet spy raised shocking security concerns.

Rumours began circulating in Westminster in early 1963, prompting Profumo to make a personal statement to the House of Commons in which he categorically denied any impropriety. Within weeks, mounting evidence made that denial untenable. Profumo was forced to admit that he had conducted a sexual affair with Keeler and, crucially, that he had deliberately misled parliament.

He resigned immediately. That resignation helped to embed the expectation that lying to parliament or misleading the house would be widely accepted (though not entirely accepted) as a resigning matter.

The affair eroded confidence in the judgment and competence of Macmillan’s government, reinforcing simmering perceptions of moral decay and elite irresponsibility. Macmillan’s personal authority never fully recovered, and he resigned later in 1963, officially citing ill health.

• Read more | "We shall never surrender": 14 quotes that have defined the past century

12. The Jeremy Thorpe affair (1976–79)

In 1967, during Harold Wilson’s tenure as prime minister, homosexuality between consenting adults had been partially decriminalised in England and Wales. But well into the 1970s, parliament still clung to old expectations about private conduct.

Jeremy Thorpe was leader of the Liberal Party from 1967 and, for a time, one of the most prominent politicians outside the two leading parties. He was articulate, media-savvy, and played a key role in the closely fought general elections of 1974, when the Liberals briefly held the balance of power at Westminster.

But Thorpe had a secret that would quickly spiral out of control. Thorpe had met a man called Norman Scott (then known as Norman Josiffe) in the early 1960s, and the pair began a relationship. However, noting the damage that it would do to his political career if this secret relationship were to become public, Thorpe allegedly threatened Scott into silence. This escalated into a botched conspiracy to have Scott killed to ensure that the secret would never get out.

In 1975, Scott’s dog was shot by an associate of Thorpe who was sent to intimidate Scott. Scott himself was unharmed, but the incident triggered a police investigation.

Thorpe was charged in 1978 with conspiracy to murder. The trial, held at the Old Bailey, was followed with immense interest by the press. Thorpe denied the charges and was ultimately acquitted, but the damage was irreversible. He had already resigned as party leader, and his parliamentary career had effectively ended.

]]> Dr Rob Blackmore <![CDATA[Not 1066 again! Should we ditch our obsession with dates?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/not-1066-again-should-we-ditch-our-obsession-with-dates/ 2025-11-21T11:58:57.000Z 2025-11-19T13:00:01.000Z In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. That, at least, is what the famous rhyme tells us. Memorising such dates is a common experience of being taught history – a cliché superbly lampooned by the witty 1930 book 1066 and All That. “History is not what you thought,” its preface suggested. “It is what you can remember.” Accordingly, as per its subtitle, it offered a “Memorable History of England, Comprising All the Parts You Can Remember, Including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates.” Conspicuously, though, “two out of the four dates originally included were eliminated at the last moment” because “they are not memorable.”

Though evidently both humorists, the book’s authors – Punch writers WC Sellar and RJ Yeatman – were making a serious point. History has long been thought to be concerned with preserving the past. The 12th-century historian and Byzantine princess Anna Komnene observed how “time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things and drowns them in the depths of obscurity”. Her solution was the study of history, which “forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time”. This is a powerful idea – one that perhaps moved King Charles I, moments before his execution in January 1649, to utter a last single word to William Juxon, the former bishop of London, instructing him: “Remember.”

But do our efforts to remember really require us to do something so trivial as memorising dates? More radically, do the historical events these dates mark even matter? The Oxford English Dictionary leaves little room for doubt. Its definition of an event is “something that happens or takes place, especially something significant or noteworthy”. History is often taught as a succinct sequence of such occurrences – those accepted as important moments, neatly knitted together to explain the present. Indeed, for many historians, especially those preoccupied with political, constitutional or military matters, the practice of history itself involves assessing the importance of events by examining their causes, contexts and consequences, considering how they represent change or continuity over time.

Yet almost no archaeologist would approach the past in such terms. Nor would many of today’s social, economic or cultural historians. In the 20th century, proponents of the Annales school, named for a scholarly journal, famously considered events relatively insignificant. French historian Fernand Braudel (1902–85) argued that events were simply “surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs”. Has the importance given to events been overstated? Should we, therefore, put less emphasis on learning dates? Are there better ways of understanding history?

The first issue to consider is just how ‘important’ dates are selected. If we are told that some day or year is more noteworthy than another, who decided this? It would be appealing to be able to say that the established chronology has been objectively selected by balanced, skilled historians, and arrived at through years of scrupulous scholarship and vigorous debate. Yet history is a human thing, written and argued over for all kinds of reasons. Even if such matters are really decided by historians – instead of, say, politicians or poets – we are all equally flawed, prone to error and liable to misinterpret the past through a panoply of biases, conscious or not. Moreover, humans are social animals and have consequently evolved to value convention, tradition and the received wisdom of our ancestors. Most of us simply accept the established chronology.

Such a shared history can indeed function as a powerful bond cementing the otherwise disparate identities of social groups. To reinforce this sense of the collective, past incidents thought worthy of remembrance were once upon a time written in stone – literally. The Parian Marble, a fragment of a stele found on the island of Paros and now displayed in the ancient Greek section of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, is inscribed with a neat chronology of events and their dates from 1582 BC to 299 BC in our terms. These include the fall of Troy, purportedly in 1209–1208 BC, and the rather more reliably dated battle of Marathon in 490 BC. The stele’s text, similar to the earlier ‘Sumerian King List’ housed in the nearby Mesopotamian gallery, fuses myth with history.

Such objects represent early examples of a phenomenon that has become increasingly common in the past two centuries or so. With the rise of nation states, backstories have been created for their “imagined communities”, as Anglo-Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson famously dubbed nations in 1983. These stories typically rest on simple historical narratives, ideally sprinkled with a few inspirational national heroes and some key dates. In the UK, a chronology of past rulers plays a major role. Reigns became surrogates for eras, suffused with each ruler’s character. Looking back, for example, we see all those who were alive between 1837 and 1901 as ‘Victorians’.

Battles are often key parts of national stories. Like Marathon for the ancient Greeks, the battles of Hastings in 1066 and Agincourt in 1415 are considered important to the English. For the British more generally, Trafalgar in 1805 and Waterloo in 1815 are significant. In Serbia, the notoriously bloody battle of Kosovo in 1389, in which forces led by Prince Lazar Hrebeljanović squared up to an invading Ottoman army under the command of Sultan Murad I, has been endlessly mythologised. Lithuanians and Poles still celebrate victory over the German Teutonic Order at the battle of Grunwald in 1410.

But few dates and events are as significant as national narratives suggest, battles least of all. Why? Because battles, though certainly rare and dramatic moments, are seldom, if ever, decisive at ending wars so can’t be imbued with much causal importance. Even after Hastings, at which much of the English ruling class was killed, it took William the Conqueror many years to bring England truly under Norman rule, a period notorious for the so-called Harrying of the North (1069–70). Likewise, the greatly celebrated clash at Agincourt (1415), which owes much of its fame to William Shakespeare, saw the mass slaughter of French nobility – but it was not until 1420 that Henry V forced Charles VI to agree to recognise the Plantagenet claim to the French throne under the Treaty of Troyes.

• Read more | Do you know the correct date of Magna Carta? Here’s why you might be wrong

Yet such totemic dates are repeatedly reinforced by that staple of public history and national myth-making: the commemoration of anniversaries. These appear to be good moments to reconsider the past and revive enthusiasm for historical enquiry, but there’s a built-in problem: at least outwardly, nobody involved questions the real significance of the events marked – that would defeat the exercise. It is understandable that, on occasion, people wish to memorialise the loss of their loved ones in wars or other disasters. In general, however, anniversaries reflect current concerns and as such are profoundly unhelpful when it comes to understanding what happened in the past.

Admittedly, some moments appear to have been so overwhelmingly important that they demand our attention. For Europe, the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 seems epochal. In China, the final defeat of the Song dynasty by the forces of Kublai Khan in 1279 has a similar significance. Yet these events represent the culmination of long and complex processes. Seen in this light, the events themselves were largely symbolic.

Surely, you say, the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas in 1492 had massive historical consequences. Well, one can quibble over whether his first voyage itself achieved much – likewise his three further transatlantic expeditions in 1493–96, 1498–1500 and 1502–04, for that matter – despite being catastrophic for the indigenous Taíno people of the Caribbean. Columbus thought – and continued to think for the rest of his life – that he was exploring east Asia.

The world indeed changed thereafter as it gradually fused into what, in 1974, the American economic historian and sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein termed the “modern world-system”, but this was not an inevitable consequence of Columbus’s first voyage. After all, Europeans had been in the Americas before. The Norseman Leif Erikson is thought to have reached North America around AD 1000, and a Norse settlement excavated at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada seems to support this. So it is of far greater historical significance that pivotal processes occurred after 1492 – but not after 1000. This is a point made in Alfred W Crosby’s groundbreaking 1972 book The Columbian Exchange, a foundational text of environmental history that charted the seismic global effects of the intercontinental transfer of plants, animals, diseases and cultures.

Such developments can be shown to be genuinely transformative to people’s lives, from the food they ate to the diseases that afflicted them. By contrast, traditional chronology often neglects the experiences of a broad spectrum of people. Not everyone was present at battles or on voyages of discovery. Indeed, most humans who have ever lived were peasants who wrested their subsistence from the soil. For these people, few experiences were shared beyond a restricted locality, especially in periods when speeds of travel were slow and communication limited. Nearly all people must have been ignorant of what we now assert, after the fact, were key events.

Others would have been simply indifferent. According to the historian De Lamar Jennsen, the Spanish Armada – King Philip II of Spain’s unsuccessful project to invade England in summer 1588 – was the “worst kept secret in Europe”. Yet research suggests that, far from striving to achieve victory for their country in some epic national struggle, during the Armada many English sailors and merchants were more preoccupied with selling food and other supplies to the enemy than with fighting them.

Perhaps the key problem is that narrative history gives us a false sense of order, in part by playing to our innate tendency to identify and interpret patterns. It suggests that big events necessarily have big consequences. This completely fails to account for the unpredictable nature of the world through which we move. Seemingly insignificant factors can and do have a disproportionate impact on history. As the proverb has it in James Baldwin’s version: “For want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; for the want of a horse the battle was lost; for the failure of battle the kingdom was lost; and all for the want of a horseshoe nail.” Conversely, apparently important things can turn out to be irrelevant.

To return to Columbus, how are we to frame the decision of Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon to support him, having equivocated for years over whether to stump up the cash to fund his voyage west? Some cite the fall of Granada to Christian forces in January 1492 – marking the end of Islamic rule on the Iberian peninsula, which gave the co-ruler monarchs both confidence and the promise of more secure finances – as the key explanation for their change of heart. Assuming this were true, we could equally portray what happened as the result of the Arab Nasrid dynasty, which ruled the Emirate of Granada for more than 250 years, carelessly losing control of their territory. In the latter reading, Wallerstein’s modern world-system was in a sense created “for want of a nail”.

As should be becoming clear, questioning the assumptions that underpin so much conventional narrative history has serious implications. This forces you, for example, to recognise that the lowliest peasant may have been as significant as an emperor or king, and that their relative impact on history was not necessarily proportionate to their immediate influence. “The ruler’s power was rarely effective,” Danish historian Patricia Crone put it, “even within such sphere of competence as he did enjoy.” Braudel hauntingly evoked a “historian who takes a seat in Philip II’s chair and reads his papers” and is transported into “a world of strong passions” but one “unconscious of the deeper realities of history, of the running waters on which our frail barks are tossed like cockleshells”. Yet such is our wish to impose order on a complex world that we have frequently reached for elaborate explanations for erratic ‘nonlinear’ outcomes, among them the capricious will of deities, the movements of celestial bodies, even conspiracy theories.

In truth, because our evidence of the past is so incomplete, we are unlikely ever to pinpoint true cause and effect. Despite this, we still tend to look for what Annales school historian Marc Bloch called “the idol of origins”. Countless books claim to trace the roots of anything from states and religions to sports. Even the aforesaid Parian Marble located the birth of agriculture to 1409–08 BC when the goddess Demeter supposedly invented grain crops. In practical terms, though, nothing has any origin in history. “For most historical realities,” Bloch wrote in the early 1940s, “the very notion of a starting point remains singularly elusive.” As we have shown, we cannot even be sure that the origin of the Columbian Exchange was Columbus himself.

• Read more | A thousand years ago, the Vikings had a shock encounter with Native Americans that ended in disaster

Indeed, trying to frame this story, we could be more radical and go back even before the time of Leif Erikson – perhaps all the way back to 14,800 years ago, when the Bering Strait Land Bridge was last rendered impassable and Asia was fully separated from the Americas. But where do you stop? Rather than there being actual origins, all things were and are constantly in the course of being made through a process of emergence. As Bloch argued, “A historical phenomenon can never be understood apart from its moment in time. This is true of every evolutionary stage, our own and all others.”

So how, then, are we to approach history without straightforward narratives? There are any number of options. Some historians, such as those of the Annales school, have examined historical structures – social, political and economic – rather than events to explain change, frequently over the long term. This approach has often been fused with the so-called histoire des mentalités (history of attitudes), which endeavours to understand the perspectives of those in the past in their own terms. Meanwhile, some social and economic historians have used Marxist theory and framed conflict between social classes as explaining change. Others have put the emphasis on demography and land use. Today, in a time of climate change, many historians are interested in understanding past societies’ interactions with their environments.

Each new approach has inevitably attracted criticism for its own alleged oversimplification and misrepresentation of the past. British historians, in particular, were notoriously hostile to the Annales school. Geoffrey Elton of the University of Cambridge, for example, held to his focus on events, with disdain for nearly all scholarship outside the study of power politics. It is said that his colleague Maurice Cowling would privately exclaim: “Annales is balls!” Despite such intransigence, though, new ideas did spread. Going forward, future historians will doubtless find even more innovative forms of historical enquiry using formidable artificial intelligence-driven tools.

• Read more | Do you know all the major periods in British history?

To be clear, though they make less of specific events, new approaches are not necessarily histories without dates. Peter Laslett, in his pioneering 1965 work of social history The World We Have Lost, even began with one: “In the year 1619 the bakers of London applied to the authorities for an increase in the price of bread.” Though Laslett pinpoints a moment that might seem banal when compared with a great battle, coronation or discovery, we should arguably accord such granular details equal attention for what they tell us of our ancestors’ priorities. Their world, like our own, was a practically infinite morass of events and dates whose relative importance and interrelationships were vastly more uncertain than we impulsively suppose.

History is not, as one student in Alan Bennett’s 2004 play The History Boys put it, “just one f****** thing after another”. Rather, as the sixth-century historian and bishop Gregory of Tours began his Historia Francorum (History of the Franks), “A great many things keep happening.” Faced with this truth, should we not stop presenting history as neat, ordered and, as such, unrepresentative of how our forebears experienced it?

Ultimately, we cannot preserve the past inside the present. Explorers such as Columbus and rulers such as Charles I or Philip II will eventually be forgotten, just as we will all one day be swept away by the stream of time. Trying to understand this process, not learning dates, is the true art of history. Kings and queens are not innately important; neither are great battles. All things are transient. As the 11–12th-century Persian poet and scientist Omar Khayyam put it, it is far better we “think, in this batter’d caravanserai [a refuge for travellers] whose doorways are alternate night and day; how sultan after sultan with his pomp, abode his hour or two, and went his way”.

This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Jonathan Healey: “A connection was made between the rarefied world of the royal court and the politics of the street”]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/jonathan-healey-a-connection-was-made-between-the-rarefied-world-of-the-royal-court-and-the-politics-of-the-street/ 2026-01-16T15:01:40.000Z 2025-08-25T08:00:36.000Z Ellie Cawthorne: Why was the winter of 1641–42 such a pivotal time in British and Irish history?

Jonathan Healey: In the heart of that winter came one of the most iconic moments in English political history. On 4 January 1642, angry at dissent from parliament, King Charles I marched down to the House of Commons and tried to arrest five MPs.

I wanted to tell the backstory of that dramatic, divisive moment. The lead-up had been a really intense period of political strife, popular protest and gradually growing disorder, all of which fed into a very frightening political crisis. Afterwards, the country descended into civil war.

Often when we read books about great revolutions or political events, we look at the deep, long-term causes. However, though that’s important, we also need to recognise trigger moments. Day-by-day or minute-by-minute, it’s often incredibly difficult to see which way things will go – but, as a historian, it’s important to immerse yourself in those turning points.

Can you give us a sense of how parliament functioned at the time?

In the early 17th century, parliament didn’t sit regularly – it was called only when the king needed it. Its role was essentially twofold: to grant taxes, particularly for war, and to propose legislation. That legislation would then get signed off by the king, which was how new laws were made. But increasingly, in the 17th century, parliament started discussing issues of high politics such as foreign policy. In the view of the king, this went beyond its remit – monarchs in this period believed that they alone had the right to decide on foreign policy. However, because they represented the taxpayers who had to pay for the wars, members of parliament felt that they should have a say. That created a flashpoint.

In the 1620s, a series of conflicts had erupted between parliament and the monarchy over issues such as tax, religion and the crown’s right to imprison people without charge. The relationship between king and parliament had broken down. Understandably peeved at this situation, Charles decided that, as far as possible, he would rule without parliament. However, over that period of personal rule, a series of serious grievances and difficulties emerged.

• Read more | "Tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy": was Charles I really that bad?

When Charles was forced to call parliament again in 1640 because of a rebellion in Scotland, all of these issues came back to the fore, and there was a sudden ferment against royal rule among MPs. By November 1640, the beginning of the so-called ‘Long Parliament’ saw a broad consensus for reform and an intention to get rid of some of the perceived abuses of the previous 11 years but, over the next 12 months, the reformists pushed things too far. They argued for reform of the bishops, and began to engage with a much broader political constituency – both of which were controversial moves. By the beginning of winter 1641, a backlash against these reformists had started.

Would these tensions have emerged regardless of the monarch, or was there something about Charles in particular that antagonised parliament?

There were lots of things about Charles that antagonised people. He had a preference for a High Anglican form of worship, which many people in England didn’t like very much. Above all, though, he was someone who really liked order, traditional social hierarchies and the aristocracy. He didn’t like bottom-up political engagement when it came to the church, and he definitely didn’t like it when it came to the state.

That view was not unusual at the time: lots of people were worried about popular protest and the perceived dangers of the mob – that was one of the factors that led them to rally around the king. But Charles took this view to quite an extreme level.

The other thing that proved difficult about Charles’s personality was his innate sense that, as king, he was right. He thought that the choice of methods he employed to get his way didn’t matter as much as the end result – and that created a sense of fear about what he might be willing to do next.

Who were the other key figures at the time, and how did they swing the pendulum?

Charles’s queen, Henrietta Maria, was a really important operator behind the scenes. By the end of 1641, one of Charles’ administrators called Sir Edward Nicholas (imagine a Thomas Cromwell-type figure but with a bigger diet) was trying to pull together a royalist party, but he didn’t know the key aristocrats. So who did he go to? The queen, because she knew everyone.

On the parliamentarian side, there was John Pym. He was an incredibly sophisticated operator – a real political magus – but some of the tactics he used in parliament were incredibly devious and cynical. On 1 December 1641, a great list of grievances and demands called the Grand Remonstrance was presented to Charles. It was passed by parliament, albeit by the skin of its teeth, but Pym and his reformists failed to secure agreement to get it printed.

So, in the Commons a few weeks later, proponents of the Grand Remonstrance waited until late, after a lot of the royalists had gone home. With the members struggling to see by candlelight, they suddenly introduced a motion to overturn the earlier vote and have the Grand Remonstrance printed. And the strategy worked – it was devious, but clever. We’re all familiar with that kind of political tactic today, but that was the first instance when we can really see it in action.

It feels like something out of a 21st-century political drama...

Yes, or The Thick of It [Armando Iannucci’s acclaimed 2005–12 spin-doctor television sitcom].

After all these years of tension, what was the spark for the events of 4 January 1642?

Up until that point, Charles had been regaining the initiative. He was building up a royalist party, and there was a real possibility that he would be able to command a majority in both houses. He’d given a proclamation summoning back to Westminster all of the MPs who’d gradually drifted home because they were fed up of sitting in parliament. The theory was that these were moderates and royalists, and that their return would stifle the simmering trouble.

However, street protests prevented the bishops (who were all royal appointments) from attending the House of Lords, and the balance tipped. By around 28 December 1641, Charles had lost the majority in both houses. He felt he had to do something to slow things down – to disrupt things. For a long time, Charles had wanted revenge against certain key players he thought had stabbed him in the back at the time of the Scottish rebellion. So he had his attorney general draw up prosecutions against five particularly troublesome MPs and one member of the House of Lords.

• Read more | The siege of Basing House: how the Civil War was won

How did things unfold on that fateful day?

News of these intended prosecutions had emerged on 3 January 1642, so parliament was incredibly tense the following morning. Everyone was very worried, and a lot of shops in London were shut. But lunchtime came and went with no developments, so parliament started sitting again for the afternoon.

Meanwhile, after pacing about the whole morning, in the mid-afternoon the king suddenly appeared from Whitehall Palace and commanded a group of soldiers to follow him. After requisitioning a coach in a ‘follow that taxi’ moment, Charles arrived at Westminster with around 500 armed men. A group of about 80–100 of those men climbed the stairs and banged on the door of the House of Commons. The debate stopped, and the king entered; the MPs all stood and removed their hats. Charles then told the speaker, William Lenthall, that he had arrived to arrest the five members, asking where they were. There was silence. The missing MPs had been warned about what was going to happen by Lucy Carlisle, a courtier close to the queen – and it became clear to Charles that they weren’t there.

Then followed a key moment: Lenthall declared that he couldn’t help Charles, because he was just the voice of the Commons. Essentially, he was expressing the point that, despite having been appointed by the crown, he was there to represent the people, not the king. Extremely angry, Charles stormed off, followed by the soldiers. It was a really dramatic moment that could so easily have ended in a massacre.

Was this a ‘crossing the Rubicon’ moment in the lead-up to civil war?

A lot of people said so at the time, and I do think that Charles took things too far. His action was quite clearly an armed threat against parliament. But the crucial thing about this incident is that it destroyed a huge amount of trust in the king. The parliamentarians saw Charles gathering soldiers around himself, and concluded that they couldn’t trust him – they needed to be able to protect themselves. So they decided to take control of the county militia.

They passed a bill to make this happen, but it wouldn’t become law unless it was signed off by the king – and of course the king was never going to sign this bill. Parliament was then forced to argue that their bill had legal force anyway. That led to a constitutional fissure: in a state of emergency, could parliament legislate without the king? This became the dividing issue.

How much was the wider public aware of what was going on in parliament at the time?

Increasingly quite well aware, because this was an era when the politics of Westminster were becoming more accessible to those on the street. England was very well connected, people knew who their MPs were, and letters were flying back and forth across the country. Scurrilous pamphlets were published in long-running battles between reformists and royalists, and the first proper political English newspaper was also launched around this time [Head of Several Proceedings, first published by John Thomas in November 1641] – a kind of weekly digest of events in parliament.

After his attempt to arrest the five MPs on 4 January 1642, Charles was passing through St Paul’s when a radical parliamentarian journalist called Henry Walker ran up and threw one of these pamphlets into his coach. Called To Your Tents, O Israel, it implored the English people to resist tyrants – so you can imagine Charles’s response when he read it. In that moment, a great connection was made between the rarefied world of the royal court and the politics of the street. And it was that incident, more than anything else, that encouraged Charles to flee London.

How was this all connected with events in Ireland?

In late 1641, there was a massive uprising in Ireland, which was predominantly Catholic. A lot of Irish people were fed up with rule by English Protestants, but in particular they didn’t want to be ruled by English parliamentarian Protestants, who were especially anti-Catholic. It was a very violent rebellion, with atrocities committed in Ulster. However, reports of the violence were wildly exaggerated, creating a panic in England that there would be an Irish invasion, and that English Catholics would rise up. One of the immediate consequences of this intense paranoia was that someone in England had to raise an army to put down the rebellion – and neither parliament nor the king could trust the other side to do so. Eventually, an army was raised, but not before months of wrangling between king and parliament – and by the time it left, relations between the two were already descending into hostility.

Did people sense that war was coming by this point?

By the spring of 1642, I think there was a real sense that war was on its way. Records reveal that some ordinary people saw this as an opportunity to settle local scores. For example, one man in Salisbury basically said: “I’m going to support the king, and I’ve decided that my neighbour is for the parliament so, when the war comes, he’s the first person I’m going to bash on the head.”

• Read more | 8 reasons why the Civil War broke out

Was there any way that the king and parliament could have found a compromise and avoided war?

I don’t know if compromise is the right word. By early 1642, there was a group of very serious reformists who didn’t trust the king, and a king who hated them in return. It’s very hard to see how those two sides could have been reconciled. But what could have happened quite easily is that the day-to-day workings of politics could have gone the king’s way. Those reformist politicians could have been isolated, and found themselves in a sticky situation. Those people really did go through this political crisis on an absolute knife edge, with a real sense of dread that they could be prosecuted and beheaded. I think that dynamic of fear helped push things towards civil war.

So I don’t think there could have been a compromise as such, but there might have been a different outcome. There were lots of moments when things could have gone in another direction. One potential counterfactual could ask: what might have happened if, when Charles got to parliament, the five MPs were still there and decided not to go quietly? You would have seen a gang of about 100 angry cavaliers, all with pistols, trying to drag people out of parliament. Would that have ended peacefully? Probably not.

Did this era determine how the relationship between parliament and royal rule played out in the longer term?

When the Restoration of the monarchy happened in 1660, interestingly it was the settlement of late 1641 that was restored. What happened in 1642 was a parting of the waves, with the radicals on the parliamentarian side headed in a much more constitutionally extremist direction. That was jettisoned after the Restoration, and parliament instead returned to a reformed position.

But there were also lots of long-term consequences of this period. It emphasised the importance of the crown working with parliament, rather than being antagonistic to it. In the later 17th century, there were very few periods where parliaments weren’t held – parliament had become an accepted part of the constitution in a way that it hadn’t been before. So that turbulent era is part of the reason why the UK became the constitutional monarchy it is today. 

Jonathan Healey is associate professor in social history at the University of Oxford. His previous book is The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England (Bloomsbury, 2023)

This article was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Reshaping narratives, repatriation and Richard III : 25 lessons we've learnt from history in the last 25 years]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/a-quarter-century-of-bbc-history-magazine-25-lessons-weve-learnt-from-history-in-the-last-25-years/ 2025-06-16T15:26:32.000Z 2025-06-18T08:00:37.000Z 1. Women played major roles in the Viking Age

Just 25 years ago, there seemed to be little new to say about the Vikings – and that was particularly the case for Viking women. The centuries-old consensus was that Viking wives and daughters stayed at home, passively watching as the Viking Age unfolded around them.

New technologies have forced a rethink, though, completely revolutionising what we know about Viking women. The first significant discovery came from a systematic survey of a nationwide database of metal-detected female dress jewellery. This demonstrated for the first time that Scandinavian women migrated to England in substantial numbers. Next, isotope analysis of teeth from the graves of Viking women showed that they had formed a key part of the migration process elsewhere, too, moving across the Viking world alongside their families.

The most dramatic and most debated discovery, however, came through analysis of ancient DNA. In Birka, Sweden, an individual buried in a high-status warrior grave turned out to be biologically female. This led to a worldwide discussion of the roles of Viking women: we now agree that, though many certainly did stay at home, some played active roles in trade, craft and manufacturing processes, and even held military positions.

Cat Jarman is an archaeologist, author and TV presenter. Her books include The Bone Chests: Unlocking the Secrets of the Anglo-Saxons (William Collins, 2023)

2. Britain has been culturally diverse for far longer than most believed

The murder of George Floyd by white police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020 signalled a turning point in the way the histories of people of African descent were taught and perceived across Europe. From that moment, the British press and institutions felt that they had to engage better with narratives about minority ethnic communities.

A renewed interest in personal histories and trajectories of people of African descent in Britain showcased stories about their links to major events – from the celebrated story of the British-Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole during the Crimean War to the experiences of black British football player Walter Tull and other soldiers of Caribbean and African descent who fought for Britain during the world wars.

We also saw a number of new black history courses launched in UK universities, and school classes featuring black, Asian and minority ethnic histories. Uncovering these multiple trajectories further highlights how culturally diverse Britain has been over many centuries, and why sharing stories about a common past can bring communities together.

Olivette Otele is a distinguished research professor at SOAS University of London. Her books include African Europeans: An Untold History (Hurst, 2020)

3. The Tudors got Richard III wrong

We learned many things from the discovery of Richard III’s skeleton beneath a Leicester car park 13 years ago. We learned about the king’s physique, his diet and the injuries he sustained while fighting for crown and country at Bosworth against a foreign-backed invader.

But, for me, two lessons in particular stand out from the discovery. The first is that history can make no progress unless it’s ready to test and deconstruct generally held traditions and assumptions – even those held by historians and archaeologists. Those of us working on the Looking for Richard Project trusted only our own painstaking, personal research in primary sources.

Second, we learned that Shakespeare’s hunchback and withered arm never existed. Analysis of Richard’s skeleton – which had lain underfoot and peacefully undisturbed for 500 years – revealed that his limbs were sound, and that his spine showed a scoliosis that was invisible to onlookers. Richard’s makeshift burial in the wake of his defeat at Bosworth, in a grave cut too short, was hugely revealing. It speaks across the centuries of a victor’s disrespect for a fallen king.

Philippa Langley is a historian, author and producer. Her latest book is The Princes in the Tower: Solving History’s Greatest Cold Case (The History Press, 2023)

• Read more | The final mystery of Richard III: how 21st-century science cracked a 500-year-old cold case

4. Magna Carta was only part of a truly revolutionary settlement

King John’s Magna Carta is perhaps the best-known document in world history, generally regarded as the first attempt to place kingship itself under the rule of law. Not surprisingly, it has been much studied. Yet a torrent of new evidence has been brought to light over the past 20 years, transforming understanding of both the document and its wider context.

We now know of many more ‘original’ Magna Cartas (from its subsequent reissues) than were previously dreamed of. And incidental discoveries in archives from Paris to New England have reshaped our appreciation of what actually happened in 1215.

A fortuitous discovery in Lambeth Palace Library, for example, reveals that the charter was part of a truly revolutionary settlement, with the barons briefly permitted dual control of local government in tandem with the king. We know, too, that John himself made no attempt to publish the charter. On the contrary, it was the bishops who ensured its distribution, preservation and even, in some cases, its physical copying.

The archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, is unmasked not so much as an honest broker between king and barons but as an ideologically committed adherent of the anti-royal party. By such means can new evidence help us rewrite the past – even for the oldest and best-known stories.

Nicholas Vincent is professor of medieval history at the University of East Anglia. His books include John (Allen Lane, 2020)

5. We ignore the past at our peril

Most compellingly, the past 25 years have reminded us that history matters. Every life-sapping conflict since the millennium – Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Ukraine, Gaza – has its roots deep in the past.

Of course, the past does not determine the future, but the future is shaped by the past. Merely railing against adversaries or shouting ‘victory’ from the rooftops may make for good headlines but, in the absence of some understanding of ‘how we got from there to here’, such indulgence is vacuous grandstanding.

The past has never been ‘another country’. This is especially true of Europe, where the tectonic plates did not stop shifting with the end of the Second World War in 1945 or the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The events of the past 25 years have demonstrated only too cruelly that our continent is inherently, and sometimes alarmingly, unstable.

All leaders claim to act in what they believe to be the national interest. The. less they make ill-judged declaratory statements of intent and the more they demonstrate a realistic vision of the future, based on a clear awareness of the past, the better it will be for all of us. History is a great mentor.

Jonathan Dimbleby is a historian, biographer and broadcaster. His latest book is Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won the War (Viking, 2024)

6. Hitler tapped into hard-wired emotions to stir up hatred

For my new book, I found it tremendously helpful to talk to academic psychologists and neuroscientists about the insights we can gain, in general terms, from their disciplines. For instance, I learned how Hitler – without knowing the science behind his actions – tapped into a profound truth about the way the brain works.

In stirring up hatred against Jews and Bolsheviks, Hitler targeted the amygdala – the part of the brain that immediately processes feelings of anxiety, fear and anger. These powerful emotions are produced almost instantly, because it’s the amygdala that helps us avoid sudden danger. It’s a survival mechanism that, as the neuroscientist Professor Robert Sapolsky explained to me, is “hard-wired into us… and we’ll never get rid of it”.

Hitler capitalised on this neurobiological tendency, and in the process did his best to subdue the parts of the brain that offer a more logical analysis. Indeed, he seemed to confirm that he was well aware of the immense power of this approach when he remarked, during a private speech to the Hamburger Nationalklub in 1926, that “the only stable emotion is hate”.

Laurence Rees is a historian, author and documentary film-maker. His new book is The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings From History (Viking, 2025)

7. Hunter-gatherers and farmers joined in wild rituals 12,000 years ago

Around the turn of this millennium, in a remote south-eastern corner of Turkey, an astonishing discovery was being made – one that stretched the story of humanity back more than 12,000 years.

Still today, only about 5 per cent of the archaeological site known as Karahantepe has been excavated – but even that tiny fraction is changing our understanding of the beginning of society as we know it. Emerging from the earth is a giant chamber with 11 huge stone phallus columns, overlooked by the face of a man with a splendid handlebar moustache and the body of a snake. The head of a big cat is visible in the centre, and carvings on 250 obelisks in the area could be mistaken for gargoyles on any medieval cathedral.We expect the female equivalent of the chamber to be unearthed soon.

Karahantepe, it turns out, is just one site in a constellation of a hundred or so – the Taş Tepeler – which together are rewriting the story of human collaboration. The orthodoxy used to be that hunter-gatherers invented farming, then settled down, then manifested religion to establish common mores to live by. But the discoveries seem to show that hunter-gatherers and the very first farmers gathered together in huge, collective spaces for wild ritual parties to share know-how and ideas.

This is one of the joys of history: it is constantly protean. Every year, new finds reveal earlier and earlier evidence of human achievement and sophistication.

Bettany Hughes is a historian, author and broadcaster. Her latest book is The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (W&N, 2024)

8. Returning stolen artefacts to Africa is no longer a naive dream

Some 25 years ago, when I was starting my career in museums, a sense of optimism and renewal imbued the sector – yet the restitution of stolen African objects did not seem a realistic possibility. Today, the culture has changed profoundly. My old employer, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, has returned its contested Benin plaques; the Dutch, Germans and French have either begun programmes of return or discussed the possibility. In Britain, the Horniman has returned ownership of its Benin plaques, and the V&A and the British Museum (both restricted by law from giving collections permanently) have entered into long-term loan agreements with the Asante royal family in Ghana.

Conversations that were inconceivable a generation ago – about ethics, about custodianship, about narrative, about ghosts – have begun to happen. We have to find ways to tell complex stories of empire, enslavement and colonialism more effectively and inclusively. It’s important that museums can craft their curatorial narratives with moral confidence, and the resolution of such thorny, long-term issues is vital.

There is still much to do. Our museums must go further in building partnerships and programmes with museums across the African continent. We need to learn from African expertise – and in turn we must share our resources and expertise to improve the telling of these rich and amazing histories everywhere.

Gus Casely-Hayford is a curator, historian and broadcaster. His books include The Lost Kingdoms of Africa (Bantam, 2012)

9. Anne Boleyn was a proto-feminist heroine

Anne Boleyn is unique among English queens, and her story is remarkable, but much of the modern fascination with that tale lies in perceptions of her fuelled by films and novels. She is now revered as a feminist heroine – a concept I would once have dismissed as anachronistic. When I said as much to the historian Sarah Gristwood, she replied: “Well, actually…” and very generously allowed me a preview of her research for her marvellous book Game of Queens (Oneworld, 2016), which inspired me to find out more.

Feminism was unknown in Tudor England. But in early 16th-century Europe, where Anne spent her formative years, there was an intellectual debate that questioned traditional attitudes to women, and looked forward to an era – the ‘reign of virtue’ – in which they would enjoy more power and equality.

In this age of female rulers, Anne had two shining examples to study: Margaret of Austria and Marguerite of Valois, both of whom she served or knew. We have to study her in this European context in order to understand the cultural influences to which she was exposed, giving her the confidence to pursue her brilliant career.

Alison Weir is an author and historian. Her latest book is The Cardinal: The Secret Life of Thomas Wolsey (Headline, 2025)

10. Mary Seacole was a true heroine of the Crimean War

One of the most significant changes over the past 25 years is the extent to which researching and writing black history has opened up. This is partly down to the dedication of historians determined to extend knowledge of the black experience by digging deeply and stubbornly into little-consulted sources.

In my own case, 20 years of concerted searching across digitised newspapers and in genealogical archives gave the lie to the till-then widely perpetuated view that Mary Seacole had been wildly overrated and undeserving of the ‘Greatest Black Briton’ sobriquet awarded her in 2004.

For decades, detractors dismissed her as a colourful but largely irrelevant presence who had done little more than ‘sell tea and buns’ to the soldiers in Crimea. But my searches, enabled by digitisation of sources, brought me to a more complete view of a woman who deserves to be viewed as a heroine. She journeyed 1,600 miles to Crimea under her own steam and at her own expense to set up shop in the middle of a war zone – a lone black woman facing prejudice and risking her own safety to help the wounded, sick and dying.

Delving into previously unseen sources over an extended period enabled me to challenge the conventional sanctification of ‘the black Florence Nightingale’ and present
a fully rounded personality.

Helen Rappaport is an author and historian. Her latest book is The Rebel Romanov (Simon & Schuster, 2025)

11. Public history can play a major role in understanding the past

One great change over the last 25 years has been the huge growth in public history – not just as an academic discipline, though of course it rests on the work of professional historians, archivists and museum workers.

Public history is the product of us all. It is about public interaction with the past, its interpretation and popularisation – changing our understanding not only of the past but also of our own times. It’s about the link between historians and the general public. Films, podcasts, radio, heritage societies, living archaeologists, local history and re-enactment groups – even readers of this magazine – are all part of it.

Good popularisation is the necessary link between professionals and the population at large, without which history becomes a closed debate between historians. And in a democracy, that link is vital: it’s part of a healthy information ecosystem, our reality check in the face of the tide of fake history on social media. Perhaps not surprisingly, in Trump’s America the US National Council on Public History is becoming more important in keeping minds open. When I hear people argue that you can’t rewrite history – though that is our actual collective job as makers of history! – it makes me think that perhaps we should have one here, too.

Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester. Read his column from the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine here

12. Charles I wasn’t so very chaste

Traditional accounts of Charles I, the so-called ‘martyr king’, have always presented him as a grave, austere and chaste figure – the very opposite of his indecorous, bawdy father, James VI & I, and his dissipated, promiscuous son, Charles II. Charles’s marriage to his wife, Henrietta Maria, was undoubtedly a happy one and, until the royal couple were torn apart during the Civil War, he does indeed appear to have remained true to her alone.

However, in an article published in 2006, the historian Sarah Poynting revisited a series of encrypted letters written by Charles in late 1647 and 1648, while he was imprisoned in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight after his defeat by the parliamentarians. Previous attempts to decipher these letters had not been entirely accurate, Poynting showed, and in fact one of them revealed that Charles had been attempting to inveigle the royalist agent Jane Whorwood into his bed.

Using the frankest language, Charles went so far as to suggest to Jane that she should secretly conceal herself in the ‘stool-room’ adjoining his chamber while he was out on his daily walk so that, after his return, he could dally with her at length. It was a remarkable discovery – and one that suggested previous characterisations of the king as “blamelessly uxorious” may well have been a little wide of the mark.

Mark Stoyle is professor of history at the University of Southampton. His latest book is A Murderous Midsummer: The Western Rising of 1549 (Yale University Press, 2022)

• Read more | "Tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy": was Charles I really that bad?

13. Mesolithic Europeans had dark skin and blue eyes

One of the major scientific advances in archaeology over the past 25 years has been the ability to extract and analyse DNA from the remains of long-dead people from the distant past. Such ancient DNA can shed light on how people were related to one another, on a family or population scale, and provide insights into the migration and movement of people over time. It can also tell us what diseases they had and – perhaps most compelling – what they looked like.

In 2018, researchers at the Natural History Museum revealed that one of the inhabitants of Mesolithic Britain, a man who lived around 10,000 years ago, had dark skin and blue eyes. This individual – known as ‘Cheddar Man’, because his remains were discovered in a cave in Cheddar Gorge in Somerset – is represented by one of the oldest complete skeletons ever identified in Britain. Earlier results from remains found from Spain, Luxembourg and Hungary confirm that most hunter-gatherers in Mesolithic Europe looked this way.

The genes for lighter skin pigmentation arrived thousands of years later, in waves of migration from the east during the Neolithic and Bronze Age. In addition, natural selection over time favoured lighter tones that allow more Vitamin D synthesis in the skin, essential in northerly climes.

Susan Greaney is a lecturer in archaeology at the University of Exeter

14. Premodern Japan was surprisingly progressive

One of the most fascinating and dynamic periods of Japanese history was the Meiji Restoration, which began with the overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868 and ended with the death of the Meiji Emperor in 1912. Japan opened up as never before to diplomatic and trading relationships with the west and, over little more than four decades, modernised its economy and society at an astonishing rate. By 1912, it had become one of the world’s great powers.

For a long time, this explosion of activity was contrasted with the preceding 250 years of the Tokugawa shogunate. That system was regarded as feudal, backward and badly out of date, requiring rescue at the hands of modernising and westernising reformers. Much though this view of history suited western historians across the 20th century, and flattering as it was to western modernity, since 2000 historians have increasingly been exploring the myriad achievements of the shogunate.

Across two and a half centuries of peace, Japanese commerce, intellectual life and the arts enjoyed extraordinary growth and creativity, from theatre through to a tourism industry and a publishing boom. Without the commercial and technical expertise, high literacy rates and great bustling cities that developed under the shogunate, the Meiji Restoration could not have happened in the way that it did.

Christopher Harding is senior lecturer in Asian history at the University of Edinburgh and creator of the IlluminAsia newsletter and podcast (illuminasia.org). His latest book is The Light of Asia: A History of Western Fascination with the East (Allen Lane, 2024)

15. Egypt’s great pyramids at Giza weren’t built by foreign slaves

Dominating the Giza Plateau for almost five millennia, the great pyramids still capture imaginations around the world. For centuries, archaeologists and historians have tried to determine how these magnificent monuments, including the only surviving Wonder of the Ancient World, were created – and now we know who built them.

Contrary to popular depictions, construction wasn’t completed by foreign slaves but by Egyptian employees. Excavations of a workers’ village over the past couple of decades, and the discovery of builders’ tombs in 2009, have transformed the narrative.

The village, dating from the Fourth Dynasty (starting c4,600 years ago), boasted bakeries, breweries, butchers and a hospital. In the burial sites, skeletons show signs of hard labour, as one might expect, but they’re also accompanied by jars of bread and beer, ready for the afterlife. There are female skeletons, too, confirming that women played roles in building the pyramids.

Hieroglyphs suggest a system of skilled labourers and artisans, from “overseer of the side of the pyramid” to “inspector of the craftsmen”. It’s also clear that villagers from surrounding areas came here to work in construction, usually in three-month stints. Their graffiti indicates that each cadre might associate themselves with one particular pharaoh or pyramid: the “friends of Khufu”, for example, or “drunkards of Menkaure”.

The inscriptions confirm that the pyramid builders were Egyptian. And the manner and location of the burials, in the shadow of the great pharaohs, puts the slave myth to bed.

Islam Issa is professor of literature and history at Birmingham City University. His latest book is Alexandria: The City that Changed the World (Sceptre, 2023)

16. Personal links to empire can reshape old narratives

Astonishingly, I completed my entire education without learning about the British empire. I don’t even have a recollection of hearing the world ‘empire’ mentioned at school – and I studied History A-level! I now know that my experience is not unique.

In the past 10 years or so, though, I have gained a growing understanding of not only what happened and how it shaped Britain today, but also of my own personal connection to empire and its tumultuous end. I feel lucky to be making programmes and writing books at a time when there is a greater interest in knowing about Britain’s imperial past – not that it is without complications or controversies.

And things continue changing: a new generation of historians is exploring archives and asking different questions. Teachers are choosing to explore empire in all its complexity, and conversations are being had between people in the diaspora and their family members about a time when they were subjects of empire. I am learning that, just because an area of history is overlooked or not spoken of, it doesn’t always have to be that way.

Kavita Puri is a journalist and broadcaster for BBC Radio 4. Read her Hidden Histories column from the May 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine here

17. Stonehenge was built in an already sacred area

The past two and a half decades have seen a transformation in our understanding of one of the most iconic ancient monuments in Britain and, indeed, the world: Stonehenge.

Archaeological research has revealed that the 4,500-year-old prehistoric ‘temple’ stood at the heart of a sacred landscape infinitely richer than previously thought. Scores of ritual monuments have been discovered in a vast halo scattered across the countryside around the monument.

Even more extraordinarily, tests have revealed that one of Stonehenge’s most important stones was transported all the way from what’s now northern Scotland – and that a large number of the smaller stones had probably originally formed part of another stone circle in south-west Wales before being brought here. And research shows that some of the Neolithic people buried at Stonehenge did not come from the area but from western Britain, possibly from modern-day Wales – significant, given the origins of many of its smaller stones.

We now know, too, that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers were active in the Stonehenge area some 5,000 years before the monument existed. This remarkable new information, together with earlier evidence that a series of Mesolithic wooden obelisks may have stood adjacent to the site of Stonehenge, suggests that the area had been sacred for millennia.

David Keys is the archaeological correspondent for The Independent

18. The tide seems to have turned against the British empire

By the year 2000, the British empire – formerly a global superpower – had been transformed into an organisation with entirely voluntary membership, the Commonwealth. At the time, academic assessment of this extraordinary transformation resulted in a number of books – including my own – which concluded that British imperialism had been overall, and in a remarkable variety of ways, both a blessing and a curse.

In the 25 years since that relatively benign consensus, however, there has been a profound anti-imperial swing resulting in a wholesale condemnation of British imperial history – shifting the dial remarkably.

It is, however, vital to understand that, even at its Victorian zenith, the empire faced trenchant criticism from within. Anti-imperial attitudes were commonplace on the left wing of the Liberal Party, the infant Labour Party and the generally hostile Irish Nationalist Party. Nonconformist churches – Methodists, Congregationalists and, above all, Quakers – voiced criticisms of imperial aims and methods. Internal opposition, from resentful Afrikaners, French Canadians and diverse displaced and conquered Indigenous peoples, also inevitably arose.

To cope with such internal opposition, and to prolong its existence, the imperial system undertook much self-correction – a process that led to mass devolution, the end of empire and the birth of today’s Commonwealth. In short, we are now keenly aware that there is no neat and fireproof analysis of the nature, governance and purpose of the British empire. It was such a huge, complex and long-lived organisation that almost every criticism, as well as almost every justification, has some validity somewhere and at some time.

Denis Judd is professor emeritus of imperial and Commonwealth history at London Metropolitan University, and author of Empire (IB Tauris revised paperback edition, 2012)

19. The world is in danger of reverting to its darkest days

After the collapse of Soviet-style communism in Russia and eastern Europe in 1989–91, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote a book called The End of History and the Last Man. In it, he predicted optimistically that the demise of the Soviet system meant that western liberalism would roll out across the world, and that the future belonged to progressive democracy, with no rivals to challenge it.

In fact, since the first issue of BBC History Magazine was published in 2000, history has evolved along a drastically different path to the one that Fukuyama predicted. So far, the 21st century has belonged to resurgent strongmen. In country after country, authoritarian regimes led by dictatorial rulers have come to power – and stayed there, with scant regard for democracy. Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, Erdogan’s Turkey, Kim’s North Korea and Sisi’s Egypt are leading examples of a worldwide trend that shows no sign of ending.

So what we have learned from history in this century is a rather troubling lesson. After the terrors of the 20th century, the world is not moving into broad, sunlit uplands but is in danger of reverting to the darkest days of the past.

Nigel Jones is a historian, journalist and former reviews editor of BBC History Magazine. His latest book is Kitty’s Salon: Sex, Spying and Surveillance in the Third Reich (John Blake, 2023)

20. Technology enables deep-sea shipwreck discoveries – but we should beware hubris

In recent years, sophisticated modern technologies have allowed humans to dive deeper, explore the seabed autonomously, and locate shipwrecks. Lost in 1915 in the Weddell Sea, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s polar vessel Endurance made headlines when its wreck was rediscovered in 2022. Recovering or even visiting the wreck, which lies at a depth of 3,000 metres, are major challenges. But submersible robots were able to photograph the Endurance from every angle, enabling scientists to create a digital model of the whole vessel as well as many artefacts preserved just as they were when the crew abandoned ship.

The wreck of the Gloucester, lost in 1682 after hitting a sandbank while transporting James, Duke of York and his court, was discovered in 2007. Future excavation of the site could provide an unprecedented opportunity to explore a Restoration royal court frozen in time. Just as the Mary Rose Museum has captured the public imagination, making Henry VIII’s warship part of British national conversations, telling the Gloucester’s stories could transform public understanding of a historical period that laid the constitutional foundations of modern Britain.

In 2025, mid-point in the United Nations ‘Ocean Decade’, a key task is to meaningfully integrate Britain’s remarkable maritime cultural heritage into ocean governance to help create a sustainable blue economy.

Nonetheless, humanity should remain humble in the face of the ocean’s uncontrollable forces. The implosion in 2023 of the submersible Titan on its expedition to the wreck of the Titanic – resulting in the death of all on board – is a cautionary tale. Some 3 million shipwrecks around the world prove that the sea – so elemental, so powerful – shouldn’t be disrespected.

Claire Jowitt is professor of Renaissance studies at the University of East Anglia

21. We now know how many enslaved African people were trafficked across the Atlantic

The transatlantic slave trade was one of the largest forced movements of people in world history – yet for decades it was difficult to quantify. Then, in the early 1990s, an international team came together to solve this problem. The result was the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, which showed that 12.5 million people were transported. Of those, 10.7 million survived the journey and arrived in the Americas.

Many people, particularly in the US and the UK, assumed that most enslaved people were trafficked to the United States. In fact, the database showed that fewer than 400,000 Africans were forcibly taken directly to mainland North America; about 4.8 million arrived in South America and 4.7 million in the Caribbean.

First published as a CD-ROM in 1999, the database was greatly expanded in the early 2000s to include the Portuguese trade in the South Atlantic. Re-released as an open-access website in 2008, including details of an additional 7,000 journeys, it has been described as one of the greatest historical achievements of the 21st century. Though the database does not give us a rich picture of the experiences of enslaved peoples, it has been critical to understanding the scale of one of the world’s worst human-rights violations.

Hannah Cusworth is a historian, curator and history education consultant

• Read more | The history of Africa: why we need to look much deeper than slavery and colonisation

22. Richard III was behind the disappearance of the princes in the Tower… probably

It’s history’s most compelling missing persons case: what happened to Edward V and his younger brother, Richard, after they were placed in the Tower in 1483 on the orders of their uncle, who soon afterwards seized the throne as Richard III?

The mystery has been the subject of intense debate ever since. Some three decades later, Thomas More had established the narrative that Richard had his nephews murdered with the help of his henchman, James Tyrell. There was no shortage of other suspects but, though every scrap of evidence has been pored over by generations of historians since, the trail was already cold.

Recently, Tim Thornton, professor of history at the University of Huddersfield, took a novel approach. Rather than researching the events leading up to the princes’ disappearance, he traced the lives of those involved in the years that followed – and found links between Thomas More and the two men he claimed had carried out the murder for Tyrell. Then, last year, Thornton came across a book of wills in the National Archives that included one made in 1516 by a wealthy London widow, Margaret Capel, half sister-in-law of Sir James Tyrell. Among her chattels listed in the will was “the chain of Edward V” – the only one of the boys’ possessions referenced in sources after their disappearance. The fact that it turned up in the family of the prime suspect makes it close to a ‘smoking gun’.

Tracy Borman is a historian, author and broadcaster. Her documentary The Princes in the Tower: A Damning Discovery is on My5

23. History can help veterans cope with PTSD

A remarkable discovery made this century is that history can be hugely therapeutic for veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It might seem deeply counterintuitive but when veterans undertake top-level archaeological research on battlefields, rather than re-igniting their traumas it often tends to work in positive ways for them psychologically, and can be a useful step on their road to recovery.

The work done by the organisation Waterloo Uncovered, founded in 2015 by former Coldstream Guards captain (and PTSD sufferer) Mark Evans, has been instrumental in this regard. Its mental-health experts found that, after helping to discover facts that are useful to military historians – the musket-ball scatter-pattern outside the orchard at the Hougoumont farmhouse in a key sector of the Waterloo battlefield, for example – veterans often saw improvements in their mental conditions.

There are various theories about the mechanisms of this effect. Perhaps such work reminds veterans that their predecessors two centuries ago encountered much the same kind of perils they did themselves in war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Evans also noted that the project provided a safe and structured environment in which veterans with shared experiences could start to open up to one another about the challenges they faced. Whatever the reason, history is helping in a tangible way today.

Andrew Roberts’ latest book, with General David Petraeus, is Conflict: The Evolution of War-fare from 1945 to Gaza (William Collins, 2024)

24. Technology has revolutionised how historians work and collaborate

One of the great things about historical research is that it keeps on moving.

When I was a young historian, looking back in time required me to handle complex written materials and work out how to supplement them with reference material culture, to archaeology or to finds such as coins and lead seals.

The past quarter-century has revolutionised the tools available to historians. Huge advances in the sciences, combined with plunging costs, mean that we now have access to data sources that don’t just provide new insights into topics such as human migration or the spread and lethality of pandemic diseases, but also enable us to do so with increasing accuracy. These are tools we must learn to rely on.

Many of these new materials are related to climate archives, enabling historians to reconstruct past periods of environmental change – or even, in some cases, to better understand the effects of single, one-off extreme events such as floods, storms or volcanic eruptions.

That, in turn, has changed how historians work, not least in the ways we can collaborate more often and more meaningfully with colleagues across research groups. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be a historian – to be part of the community of people interested in the past.

Peter Frankopan is professor of global history at Oxford University. His latest book is The Earth Transformed: An Untold History (Bloomsbury, 2023)

25. Powerful female leaders weren’t the sex-crazed failures of (manmade) myth

Our understanding of queenship has, thankfully, moved forward in the past 25 years – just as women’s history has also moved forward.

Female rulers such as Cleopatra and Mary, Queen of Scots have all too frequently been cited as cautionary tales about what follows when you give women power: sex and death. But in recent years, revisionist historians such as Kara Cooney, Joyce Tyldesley and Joann Fletcher have written brilliant accounts of Cleopatra, challenging the perception of her as a sex-mad failure.

Mary, Queen of Scots was surrounded by men attempting to seize her power – and, when she had a son, she was set on a course that led to her being deposed in favour of him. Lord Bothwell made her go back to his castle, where he assaulted her in an attempt to force her to marry. Past historians framed her for setting up this event. Today, though, we understand that a woman who had been seized and sexually assaulted was expected to agree to marry the man who attacked her. In Mary’s case, all of the lords were in agreement with that course of action – so what choice did Mary have?

As we are increasingly coming to understand, female rulers need to be seen in context. If they lost to the powerful men of the time or, indeed, the Roman empire, we need to grasp why that happened. Such insights can shape perceptions of the past – and a future with women in power.

Kate Williams is professor of public engagement with history at the University of Reading. Her latest book is The Royal Palaces: Secrets and Scandals (Frances Lincoln, 2024)

This article was first published in the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> Dr Jonathan Healey <![CDATA["Tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy": was Charles I really that bad?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/tyrant-traitor-murderer-and-public-enemy-was-charles-i-really-that-bad/ 2025-04-15T16:43:19.000Z 2025-04-15T16:43:19.000Z On 9 July 1637, King Charles I chaired a meeting of his Privy Council at Greenwich Palace. Among the business was the case of two draymen, William Willis and John Collins, who had been involved in a road-traffic collision. They had allowed their cart to crash into that of the Earl of Exeter, a member of the powerful Cecil family. A local jury had cleared Willis and Collins of any wrongdoing, but the king was not happy with that outcome.

Charles and his council overturned the verdict, ordering that the two men be “whipped publicly through the town” as a fearsome example to others. After this, the draymen would be sent to prison, and there kept at work until further notice.

Charles I was a man who liked order. He organised his political thought around certain maxims, one of them being: “It is better the subject suffer a little than all lie out of order.” Willis and Collins certainly suffered: they were flogged and locked up. After all, one couldn’t have lowly draymen crashing into nobles’ coaches and then being acquitted: it was indecorous and subversive.

Charles was a fussy man. His government regulated everything from the lengths of taxi journeys to the wearing of fake jewellery. He once even tried to ban swearing. Bookish, thoughtful and sensitive, Charles was possessed of a heightened sense of his own honour and dignity. By the time he ascended the throne in 1625, he was also politically active, well read and fully capable of forming his own opinions – a bit too much so, perhaps, for a king.

When Charles came to power in 1625, it was a highly unusual event. He was the first adult to ascend the Scottish throne since 1390, and only the second adult male to take the English throne since Henry VIII in 1509.

• Read more | When was the last battle between England and Scotland?

He left his thrones in a strange way, too. In 1649, he was put on trial for treason against his own people, and executed publicly. His statue in London’s Royal Exchange was defaced with the Latin words Exit Tyrannus, Regum Ultimus – ‘Exit the Tyrant, the Last of the Kings’.

The trial itself had been justified on the grounds that it was legal – indeed required – for the representatives of the people to resist a tyrannical king. To its instigators, this was a moment of emergency: the killing of a king was a necessity, albeit a cruel one.

• Read more | Why Charles I had to die

Charles certainly had a case to answer. After his defeat in 1646 at the end of the first phase of the Civil War, he only negotiated in bad faith – and when the opportunity to start a fresh conflict presented itself in 1648, he took it.

His actions sparked renewed violence and bloodshed, and led to radical of his enemies to push for his trial, based on a well-established philosophical position, salus populi suprema lex: the safety of the people is the supreme law. Charles claimed that his trial was illegal, and many have agreed with that assessment – yet it's far from black and white.

• Listen | Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Charles I’s trial on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time

Was Charles truly a tyrant? From a modern perspective – in an age that has given us men such as Hitler and Stalin – surely swotty, art-loving Charles hardly registers. True, he had a cruel streak. After a riot in Lambeth in 1640, he had one young lad tortured – making out the order for that punishment in his own hand – and another hanged, drawn and quartered.

Twice in the winter of 1641–42, he gave the order for soldiers to shoot protesters in the streets if they refused to go home. But he was probably no nastier than other leaders among his contemporaries – including even his son, Charles II, under whom great cruelties were committed in Scotland, and during whose reign many hundreds of English Dissenters died in horrific prisons.

Charles I was authoritarian. He liked to be obeyed, and sometimes took it personally when he wasn’t. One infamous scandal involved a fairly unlikeable man called William Prynne, who wrote a book perceived to be insulting to the queen. In 1634, Prynne was sentenced to be imprisoned, and to have his ears cut off. Come 1637, when the same man again got into trouble, it transpired that his ears had been only partially sliced the first time around. Furious, Charles personally directed the Privy Council to find out who had been at fault for that half-done job.

Charles also believed in personal sacrifice for the greater good: he applied this principle to himself, but inevitably it was his people who usually had to bear the brunt.

England was then a place riven by discord. The government was short of money – ironic, given the great wealth of the country at large – and, thanks to rising literacy and a thirst for news, growing numbers of people in England were keen to discuss politics and religion. London was expanding, too, bringing more people close to the geographic centres of politics at Whitehall and Westminster.

Throughout Charles’s life, he carried with him a grave distrust of his subjects and their desire to involve themselves in politics. During his childhood, one of his tutors had written that the people were a “many-headed monster, which hath neither head for brains, nor brains for government”. It was a sentiment Charles remembered.

He never shied from controversy, either, and it was when dealing with controversial topics that his authoritarian side dominated. In religion, Charles favoured a new, ornate and ritualised form of worship. He disliked those who disagreed, especially the so-called ‘Puritans’ who preferred church practice to be much plainer. Charles believed that their form of worship – which emphasised reading, careful listening and participation – was populist and anarchic. His government used the bishops to harass dissident clergymen and writers.

• Read more | Did Oliver Cromwell really ban Christmas? The Puritan assault on Christmas during the 1640s and 1650s

Another of Charle's most persistent problems was money. He knew that the English state was "press beyond her strength" and, in the 1620s, desperately needed to increase military spending. A furious war was raging on the continent, and Charles found himself fighting both Spain and France.

Many argued that there was only one legitimate way of raising tax: ask parliament. The English parliament, though, was reluctant to provide the necessary finance without first airing “grievances”. So in 1626, Charles started to contemplate ruling without them. He levied a ‘Forced Loan’ – in effect, a direct tax that didn’t require parliamentary sanction. He argued that this was an emergency and that, in such cases, it fell to the king to levy funds – even if he hadn’t first obtained permission from the people. Worse, in order to ensure that the Forced Loan was collected, Charles imprisoned those who didn’t pay.

It was here that a key technique he used to rule came to the fore. Charles allowed the issue to come to the law courts – but made sure that he won. In 1627, five imprisoned knights had sued for habeas corpus – demanding that they be allowed to challenge before a court the justification for what they claimed to be their unlawful detention. Before the case was heard, though, Charles personally interviewed the 12 judges to make sure that they were on his side. Unsurprisingly, they ruled in his favour – that he could imprison people without demonstrating a cause.

A showdown followed. Parliament pushed for a ‘Petition of Right’ stating certain key freedoms. Taxation without parliamentary grant was declared illegal, as was imprisonment without cause being shown. Charles reluctantly allowed the petition – but then prorogued parliament and recalled all print copies of the petition, ordering that they “be made waste paper”. It was then reissued but qualified with a series of his objections.

In the summer of 1628, Charles’s fears about his people were dramatically confirmed. His unpopular favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, was stabbed to death in Portsmouth. Buckingham’s killing was widely celebrated – indeed, his funeral was held at night to prevent the attendance of jeering crowds. And Charles had other reasons for fearing his subjects. Within months of ascending the throne, he had married the young and vivacious French princess Henrietta Maria. The queen’s father, Henry IV of France, had been assassinated years earlier; in addition, she was a Catholic – and anti-Catholic sentiment was rife. No wonder she and her husband worried for her safety.

More discord followed in 1629. When parliament returned that January, MPs started arguing again about tax and religion. Exasperated, Charles decided to send away the quarrelling politicians – but when his order arrived, a small group of MPs restrained the Speaker in his chair and passed a series of inflammatory motions. Charles was furious, and vowed to rule without parliament for as long as he could. Dissident MPs were imprisoned; after their leader, Sir John Eliot, died in the Tower of London, Charles refused to let his wife bury him at home in Cornwall.

What followed was a period of ‘Personal Rule’ sometimes seen as a manifestation of Charles’s alleged tyranny. Clearly, he wanted to rule without parliament; he believed that parliaments were “of the nature of cats, that ever grow cursed with age”.

But was royal rule so bad? The country was at peace, and some later looked back on these as halcyon days. Charles raised enough money to run a functioning government. It was how he did so that became the problem, and one issue in particular sparked controversy. There is no doubt that the navy needed serious investment. The obligation to pay for ships had traditionally fallen on the coastal counties and towns; now Charles – not unreasonably – extended this inland. By doing so, though, he was effectively creating a new tax – without parliament.

Once more, Charles turned to his judges. He would allow Ship Money to be tested in the courts, and he would win. The king’s lawyers argued that this was an emergency situation, so it was the monarch’s duty to raise money for necessary defence. This he could do without parliament because, his attorneys argued, as “the King of England... He is an absolute Monarch”. The judges – men who had been picked by the crown – agreed, though remarkably by only the tightest of margins.

Ship Money seems obscure today, but at the time people worried that it gave the king an unlimited right to seize property simply by declaring an ‘emergency’. Whether or not Charles was a tyrant, he was building an absolutist monarchy. As the politician John Culpepper observed: “If the laws give the king power in any danger of the kingdom, whereof he is Judge, to impose what and when he please, we owe all that is left to the goodness of the king, not to the law."

We cannot, of course, judge Charles only on his rule in England. He was king of Scotland and Ireland, too – and in both he faced huge rebellions.

He sent one of his most capable ministers to govern Ireland in 1633. Thomas Wentworth, later Earl of Stratford, was busy and bright, but was also possessed of a dangerous ideology. He believed that “reason of state” trumped law. This was similar to Charles’s belief in suppressing private interests for the public good, but it was sharper in focus and backed by a fearsome personal energy. In Ireland, Wentworth successfully played off factions against each other, and built up a military to enforce his will. His aim was to make Charles – in Ireland, at least – “as absolute a monarch as Christendom can set forth”. This generated huge resentment, which in 1641 exploded into a massive uprising against English and Scottish settlers.

By that point, Charles’s rule had already started crumbling elsewhere. Desperate to bring his kingdoms into some sort of religious unity, he had tried to impose English church practice in Scotland. This was met with fierce resistance, beginning in July 1637 with a riot in St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh. And when Charles failed to put down the Scottish rebellion, he was forced to turn once more to his English parliament for money.

By now, the three kingdoms were cascading into Civil War. Thomas Wentworth – dubbed ‘Black Tom Tyrant’ – was put on trial and beheaded. Charles changed his approach to religion, and cultivated some he had once thought of as puritans, in the hope of winning the political game of chess. “I have somewhat altered from my former thoughts,” he noted slyly, “to satisfy the times.”

• Read more | 10 key battles of the Civil War

He disavowed Ship Money, and agreed to call parliament at least once every three years. By the end of 1641, parliament was trying to remove his power to appoint his own government ministers; in 1642, they tried to strip him of his military authority, too.

Much of the blame for the problems that beset his kingdoms has been laid at Charles’s feet – and with good reason. He could be difficult to trust. From 1637, he tried to use his military power to threaten those who opposed his policies. He twice raised an army against Scotland rather than engage in serious negotiations. In November 1640 and in May 1641, he plotted to use the guns and garrison at the Tower of London to overawe London and parliament.

In autumn 1641, he facilitated a violent plot in Edinburgh against the Scottish leaders, including his kinsman the Marquess of Hamilton. Late in 1641, he gathered ‘Cavaliers’ at Whitehall Palace, ostensibly to protect his family but also to threaten parliament. Then, in the early days of 1642, he took several hundred of these men to Westminster with the aim of arresting five dissident MPs.

That was an error from which Charles never recovered. The astrologer William Lilly thought that “This rash action of the king’s lost him his crown”, as it “left scarce any possibility of reconcilement; he not being willing to trust them, nor they to trust him.” As Charles’s Cavaliers stood outside the Commons, some of them cocked their pistols and threatened to shoot MPs. Charles did not allow this to happen, but parliament feared a massacre.

The day after his attempted arrest of MPs, Charles travelled to London's Guildhall and issued reassurances that he wished to rule “like a king, not a tyrant”. Yet many were not so sure. That winter, he fled for the countryside, “so fleeting and so friendless”, as one observer put it. There had been disorderly protests even under the palace windows, and a parliamentarian polemicist at one point managed to throw into the king’s coach a pamphlet that likened Charles to Rehoboam, a tyrannical biblical king. For someone who had always feared the “many-headed monster”, it was terrifying that his subjects could get so close to his person.

So was Charles I a tyrant? Historians have deployed the term ‘legal tyranny’, referring to his making controversial policies certain that the judges – who depended on the king for promotion – would support him in the courts. Small wonder that disgruntled subjects turned to parliament as a higher authority.

• Read more | Has history been unfair to Charles I?

By 1642, though, Charles’s enemies had gone much further. They believed that parliament needed to control the government as well as the law: to wield the power to appoint ministers and control the militia. Their partisans had even started arguing that ‘reason of state’ allowed them to act beyond what was ordinarily legal. No longer could parliamentarians claim to be upholding the law; now they had to say they were protecting the people. It was a revolutionary idea – and there was no way that Charles would concede it without a fight.

Jonathan Healey is associate professor in social history at Kellogg College, Oxford. His latest book is The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England (Bloomsbury, 2023)

This article was first published in the April 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> Jessie Childs <![CDATA[The siege of Basing House: how the Civil War was won]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/civil-war-siege-of-basing-house-parliamentarian-victory-how-why-important-oliver-cromwell/ 2024-09-26T10:00:21.000Z 2024-09-26T10:00:21.000Z On a plant-finding expedition to Kent in 1633, the apothecary Thomas Johnson looked out from the tower of Canterbury Cathedral and despaired at the inadequacy of the town’s defences. “Our people,” he lamented, “like the Spartans of old, set more store upon arms than upon walls for protection.”

A decade later, Lieutenant Colonel Johnson was shoring up the defences of Basing House in Hampshire, ahead of an imminent parliamentarian attack – and presumably wishing that someone had listened to him earlier.

We have always preferred the glamour of the battle to the dog-work of a siege. We hear the rumble of the cavalry charge and the first dry rattle of new-drawn steel more keenly than the sound of digging and guard duty. We imagine the king’s battle standard rescued at Edgehill and the royalist horse reduced to “stubble” by Cromwell’s troops at the battle of Marston Moor, but a half-starved garrison negotiating terms of surrender is rarely part of the picture.

Yet the Civil War was not only won on Marston Moor, nor even at the battle Naseby when Charles I lost his artillery and a large part of his officer corps in June 1645. It was won three months later, at Bristol, when his nephew Prince Rupert yielded England’s second city and, with it, his command of the royalist army. It was won when further strongholds were taken and destroyed, securing parliament’s supply lines and, ultimately, giving the king nowhere to hide.

• Read more | 10 key battles of the Civil War

From Hull, where arguably the war began in July 1642, to Harlech, where the last royalist garrison surrendered in March 1647, the first Civil War was predominantly fought around walled towns, medieval castles and fortified manor houses. Each side had areas of dominance, but this was not a regional conflict in the sense, say, of the American Civil War, with a geographically defined North and South.

Once it became clear that the war between king and parliament would not be decided by one big battle, it mushroomed into hundreds of local contests for resources, supply lines and communications. In Ireland, too, the fighting was characterised by batteries and blockades, skirmishes and storms. “We make war more like foxes than like lions,” wrote Roger Boyle, 1st Earl of Orrery, “and you will have 20 sieges for one battle.”

Civil War: neighbourhoods become frontlines

This all matters because the nature of the Civil War helps to explain the pity of it, the scope of it, and its consequences – not least for the king. The causes of the war were by no means clear-cut, but the execution of Charles I was the result of enough people in power believing that only a ruthless tyrant could renew hostilities, as Charles had done in 1648 (again suffering defeat), after so much slaughter.

Charles, the army leaders decided, was a “man of blood” against whom the Lord had witnessed and by whom an account must be made “for that blood he had shed and mischief he had done”.

• Read more | Why Charles I had to die

We hardly have to look back to the 17th century to know that when neighbourhoods become frontlines, civilians pay the price. Sieges terrorised local communities, spread disease and sucked the produce from the land. Houses were destroyed to provide field of fire, “contribution money” was collected by both sides, and farms were stripped bare.

The almsfolk at the hospital of St Mary Magdalen near Winchester lost 36 sheep to the royalists over Christmas 1643. They didn’t complain at the time, but the following March they were forced to petition General Ralph Hopton after royalists broke in and took all their seed barley and every bit of wood – the gates, doors, wainscot, tables, cupboards, even the pews in their chapel. “Your poor petitioners,” they wrote, “being very aged and impotent persons [are] thereby made destitute of the means of having either temporal or spiritual food.” Hopton signed a protection order, but by then there wasn’t even a stable door left to close.

Timeline: key moments in the Civil War

22 August 1642

Following years of escalating tensions between Charles I and his opponents – fanned by his dismissal of parliament, imposition of taxes and attempts to impose religious uniformity – the king raises his standard at Nottingham. This signals the official start of the Civil War between royalist and parliamentary forces.

23 October 1642

The war’s first big battle at Edgehill (Warwickshire) produces no decisive winner and consigns the country to a long conflict fought locally around fortified strongholds.

10 August 1643

King Charles besieges Gloucester but withdraws the following month upon the approach of the Earl of Essex, chief commander of the parliamentarian army. The armies clash at Newbury on 20 September; the result is inconclusive.

1 July 1644

Charles’s nephew Prince Rupert relieves York for the royalists, but is defeated the following day by a joint Scottish and parliamentary force on Marston Moor.

31 May 1645

Rupert sacks Leicester in the presence of the king. The royalists march south and meet the New Model Army at Naseby on 14 June, where Charles loses his artillery and many of his officers.

10 September 1645

Bristol, England’s second city, falls to the New Model Army. “Doubtless God is with them,” one Puritan preacher declares.

5 May 1646

Charles surrenders to the Scots at Southwell, Nottinghamshire (hoping they will be more sympathetic captors than parliament), and orders his garrisons to surrender. Handed on to parliament in 1647, the king is eventually executed on 30 January 1649.

11 September 1649

Oliver Cromwell’s forces storm Drogheda and slaughter its royalist defenders in what was the most notorious episode in his bloody, siege based campaign in Ireland.

3 September 1651

Cromwell storms Worcester. Charles II goes on the run and eventually escapes to France. He will not return for nine years. On 16 December 1653, Cromwell is appointed Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland.

Why was Basing House important?

A series of sieges at Basing House, 20 miles north-east of Winchester, illustrates the hard lessons parliament had to learn before it could win the war. Basing House was the mist-shrouded mansion of John Paulet, 5th Marquess of Winchester. Said to be “the greatest of any subject’s house in England”, it was encircled by a deep ditch and thick, earth lined walls.

Situated 40 miles south of the king’s headquarters in Oxford, and 50 miles south-west of parliamentarian London, it disrupted military and commercial traffic between the capital and the west and channelled resources and intelligence up to Oxford.

Symbolically, too, Basing House – a refuge for prominent royalist families and their treasure chests – was vital. It came to be viewed from London as a microcosm of Stuart degeneracy. The marquess was Catholic – a “papist” to use the contemporary slur – while his wife, Honora, was half-Irish.

Their beleaguered guests included actors, artists, writers and the architect Inigo Jones who helped with the fortifications. To Puritans, Basing House was “a limb of Babylon”, “a nest of the vilest vermin in all the kingdom”. It was here, announced one preacher, that “religion and laws and liberties and the very being of our English nation lie at stake”.

The first assault on Basing House

It took parliament more than two years to figure out how to take it. The first major assault on Basing House – after a failed local attack in July – was commanded by William “the Conqueror” Waller, a Puritan general who detested “this war without an enemy”, but was nevertheless certain that God would help him win it. He set down before Basing House on 6 November 1643 with around 6,000 men. The garrison comprised 400 defenders. It was, Waller was told, “but a slight piece”.

The marquess refused Waller’s summons to surrender and presented stiff resistance the following day. A sortie led by the apothecary Thomas Johnson resulted in the farm outhouses being set alight and Waller’s men either burned to death or in flight.

The following week, Waller decided to have “another fling at Basing”. Again, his ratio was good, but almost half his force was made up of Londoners who were not keen on service beyond the capital. Everything that could go wrong for Waller went wrong on 12 November 1643.

• Listen | Jonathan Healey delves into the turbulent 17th century, which witnessed regicide, civil war and the political awakening of society

The Londoners’ lack of morale and discipline was exposed when they were blasted with case shot (canisters filled with musket balls) and refused to drive on. Another unit forgot their musket drills, so that the second ranks fired before the first had time to turn away and the “third ranks fired upon them, and so, consequently, the rear fired upon their own front and slew and wounded many of their own men”.

Waller fared better on the house’s east front, but his scaling ladders were too short, his petard (a bell-shaped bomb) was clamped to the wrong place and, again, the resistance was epic. A sniper inside the house picked off charging assailants, while women threw down bricks and stones from the roof. “Come up Roundheads if ye dare!” they screamed. At four in the afternoon, darkness and driving rain forced Waller to withdraw.

One soldier, left behind with a shattered leg, cried out for help. What, shouted the defenders of the house, had the king ever done to him to make him rebel? At which question, one royalist newsbook reported, “this desperate wretch pulled out his knife and cut his own throat”.

The following morning, Waller wanted to resume the assault. But, having slept out in the cold and sodden fields, and hearing that a royalist relief force was on its way, the Londoners chanted “Home! Home!” and Waller was forced to relent. His report made clear that, although God had chastised them with this beating, parliament should have supplied better men.

The second assault on Basing House

The second attempt on Basing House was a summer blockade imposed by the local Roundhead, Richard “Idle Dick” Norton. It lasted for 24 weeks and was hell for both sides.

Smallpox, starvation, heavy shelling and internal tensions brought the royalists to the brink of collapse, but the garrison commander, a gnarly merchant called Marmaduke Rawdon, promised the marquess that his men would never surrender for as long as there was “a horse in the house, dog, cat or rat, or anything that is eatable”. He asked only for some wine and good tobacco from the marquess’s stores.

By autumn, the defenders looked more like “prisoners of the grave than the keepers of a castle”. But marshland in front of the house ensured that it was never fully surrounded and, sometime over the summer, the Marchioness of Winchester slipped out to Oxford where she implored her fellow Catholic, Henry Gage, to save them.

• Read more | From the home front to the front line: what were the roles of women in the Civil War?

Anyone who thinks that 17th-century soldiering was primitive work should study this exceptional operation. At 10pm on 9 September 1644, Gage led a royalist relief force on two night-marches through enemy-held territory. Each man was disguised with an orange-tawny scarf – parliament’s colours – and the troopers shared their horses with the footsore infantry. Gage was the first to do this, inspiring the rest.

On the outskirts of Basing House, having swapped their orange scarves for white ribbons, they fought a skirmish with the besiegers – as fierce as any battle for those involved – and managed to cut through the lines and into the house. After raiding Basingstoke on market day, Gage provisioned the garrison, stayed for the night and then, having conducted a disinformation campaign to make the parliamentarians think he would be sticking around for longer, quietly slipped away.

He took a different route back to Oxford, swimming the horses over the river Kennet (the troopers took the musketeers up on their saddles) and evading every high-alert patrol. It was, thought one royalist, “the most soldier-like piece these wars have ever yet afforded”.

Five leading players in the battle for Basing House

ROYALIST: Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Johnson

A valiant soldier, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Johnson was an apothecary from Yorkshire, and the first person known to have sold bananas in London. A keen plant-hunter, he planned to write a catalogue of the plants of England and Wales. He was one of the most brave and popular officers at Basing House, as valued “for his valour and conduct as a soldier” as “his excellency as a herbalist and physician”. Shot in the shoulder in September 1644, he died two weeks later.

ROYALIST: Honora, Marchioness of Winchester

The chatelaine of Basing House, Honora was the grand daughter of Elizabeth I’s spymaster, Francis Walsingham, and the half-sister of Robert Devereux, the 3rd Earl of Essex and lord general of the parliamentarian army. She defended Basing House during the first attack, tearing lead off the roof to cast bullets, and held her broken family together after the Civil War.

ROYALIST: Colonel Marmaduke Rawdon

Marmaduke Rawdon was the military governor of Basing House. He was a leading London merchant and one of the first colonisers of Barbados. A staunch royalist, he wore a medallion of Charles I around his neck – but his Protestant beliefs made him clash with the Catholic Marquess of Winchester. Rawdon was expelled from the garrison before its last stand.

ROYALIST: Inigo Jones

The great designer and architect Inigo Jones was later described as having been “a very aged, infirm man” at the time he came to Basing House. According to one newsbook, he was brought in to help design the house’s fortifications. At the final storm, he was stripped of his clothes by a parliamentarian soldier (an accepted privilege of plunder) and carried out of the house wrapped in a blanket. He died seven years later, just before his 79th birthday.

PARLIAMENTARIAN: Hugh Peter

Hugh Peter was a Puritan preacher and a chaplain in the New Model Army. His graphic report of the fall of Basing House depicted the royalist stronghold as a nest of idolatry. The captured women were “entertained by the common soldiers somewhat coarsely”, he said, “yet not uncivilly; they left them with some clothes upon them”. A vigorous promoter of the regicide (though not a signatory of Charles I’s death warrant), he was executed on 16 October 1660.

The road to victory at Basing House

A month later, parliament’s southern armies converged around Basing House. They totalled 19,000 men and comprised Waller’s force, Lord General Essex’s main field army and the formidable Eastern Association commanded by the Earl of Manchester and his cavalry officer, Oliver Cromwell. Their scouts told them to expect the king on 21 October, and they drew up in battle array.

The following day, though, upon hearing that Charles had wheeled about towards Newbury, they took the road after him. There was no trust between the parliamentarian generals at this point and the resulting second battle of Newbury on 27 October failed to deliver a killer blow to the royalist cause.

After a hard reckoning and the introduction of a Self-Denying Ordinance (passed later, in April 1645) that required all peers and MPs to resign their military offices, parliament formed the New Model Army. It had a new commander-in-chief, Sir Thomas “Black Tom” Fairfax, and stricter discipline. Fairfax ensured that the men were paid centrally and regularly. Fornicators were whipped, and plunderers were shot. In its first year of campaigning, the New Model Army fought two major battles and a dozen sieges and storms.

The siege of Basing House

Cromwell, now lieutenant general of the cavalry, took a detachment to Basing House on 8 October 1645. Heavy bombardment produced two effective breaches in the house’s walls. On the 14th they stormed the house and took it in the better part of an hour.

Whereas the garrison had been divided by religion and had lost its Protestant regiments, the New Model Army was united by an intense religious fervour. Cromwell prayed the night before the storm to the drumbeat of Psalm 115, reflecting on the lines decrying idols: “They that make them are like unto them, so is every one that trusteth them.”

• Listen | Ronald Hutton discusses Oliver Cromwell’s rise to power, exploring the brilliance and cruelty of the future Lord Protector

Confidence stemmed, too, from numerical advantage (about 6,000 besiegers to 300 defenders), heavy artillery and the knowledge that no outside force could now save Basing House. The local royalist garrisons had fallen, and New Model discipline won local support. The fighting was savage and about half the defenders were slain. Some Jesuit priests were executed in cold blood and one woman, the daughter of a clergyman, was killed trying to save her father. However, the attackers showed restraint in some quarters. More than 100 prisoners were taken, including 15 “Irish rebels”.

The New Model Army’s combination of numbers, guns, motivation, morale and controlled ruthlessness proved a winning formula. “God exceedingly abounds in His goodness to us,” wrote Cromwell that night as a fire took hold of the house. He recommended that it be demolished, “utterly slighted” – a policy that helped ensure strongholds could not be retaken.

Acts of courage and atrocity

The news of the fall of Basing House was received in Oxford with a cry of anguish “as if they had lost their gods”. In London, the bells rang out in celebration. Babylon had fallen. It was not the end of the war, but it helps explain how it was won.

There is another reason why we should set more store upon walls than weapons. The length and intensity of a siege brings the face of war into sharp relief. Wonderful things happened at Basing House: acts of courage, creation, love, even a wedding. But it also witnessed desertions, betrayals and atrocities including a rudimentary form of chemical warfare: the parliamentarians set fire to hay bales saturated in sulphur and arsenic, and directed the fumes towards the house.

For the royalist clergyman Humfrey Peake, a siege was mental as well as physical torture. He was tormented by the “sad spectacle” of death, the “intolerable stench” of it and the “hideous shapes” of death’s soldiers mustering against him. His nerves were shredded by the “panic terrors” of others, their “shrieks and cries and noise and tumult”, and the “sad unrest” that shows people “what they are”.

Of the many ways in which men try to ruin one another, Peake concluded, “this of a siege is the sharpest and the saddest”. More than a flash of courage or cowardice on the battlefield, a siege drills deep down into the human condition and draws out the best and worst of humanity.

This article was first published in the June 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> Emma Slattery Williams <![CDATA[10 key battles of the Civil War]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/what-key-important-battles-civil-war/ 2025-12-16T16:31:55.000Z 2023-06-13T11:38:37.000Z  

Newburn Ford, 28 August 1640

Between 1637 and 1640, King Charles I had tried to enforce Anglican religious observances on the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland, including a new prayer book. National Scottish resistance and defiance of the king’s orders resulted in the so-called Bishops’ Wars of 1639- 40 – a precursor to the Civil War. Parliament refused to support the king, financially or militarily, in his war with Scotland, so Charles was forced to send commander Edward Conway, 2nd Viscount Conway, to the Scottish border with only the relatively small English force he had managed to gather.

• Browse | Expert articles, podcasts and video on the Civil War

On 28 August 1640, just outside Newcastle at Newburn Ford, the king’s troops faced a 20,000-strong Scottish covenanter army – Scottish Presbyterians who, in 1638, had signed a covenant opposing attempts to impose English liturgical practice and church governance on Scotland. Charles’s English forces were unprepared, outnumbered, and easily defeated.

A few days after the battle, the Scottish occupied Newcastle; Charles was forced to call a parliament – eventually to become known as the Long Parliament – in order to raise money to pay his own army and to buy off the Scots. The Scots finally marched out of Newcastle in August 1641.

Powick Bridge, 23 September 1642

The first military action between Crown and Parliament took place in Worcestershire, following Charles I’s official declaration of war the previous month. Royalist Sir John Byron, who was escorting a convoy of valuables between Oxford and Shrewsbury, sought refuge in Worcester to avoid the parliamentarian advance guard that had been dispatched to seize the wealth.

Alerted to the danger, Prince Rupert, the king’s nephew, was sent with a force of around 1,000 cavalry to support Byron, as parliamentarian forces sought to block Byron’s route out of the city. The resulting skirmish took place on and around Powick Bridge, about two miles outside Worcester. Prince Rupert’s experienced troops routed the parliamentarian forces, and Powick became a major propaganda victory for the royalist cause.

Edgehill, 23 October 1642

The first major pitched battle of the Civil War took place four weeks after Powick Bridge, when parliamentarian Captain-General, Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex, seized an opportunity to halt the king’s forces as they marched to London from Shrewsbury, in October 1642.

• Read more |  Is it incorrect to refer to the ‘English Civil War’?

Both armies had around 15,000 men, but the parliamentarian cavalry was no match for the royalist horsemen, commanded by Prince Rupert. A royalist win seemed inevitable. Believing victory was close at hand, Rupert led a cavalry charge on the parliamentarian baggage train, leaving the royalist troops vulnerable; what was left of the parliamentarian cavalry made light work of the royal infantry.

By the next day, neither side seemed keen to continue the fighting, so the battle ended in an indecisive draw. The road was now clear for the king to head to the capital, but he decided to take Banbury on his way, allowing Essex to reach London first. Charles settled in Oxford, which would become his base. Some historians suggest that if Rupert had remained on the battlefield and aided the infantry, a royalist victory at Edgehill could have ended the war.

Adwalton Moor, 30 June 1643

In late June 1643, parliamentarian commander Ferdinando, 2nd Baron Fairfax, and 3,500 men battled 10,000 royalist troops under the Earl of Newcastle. After Newcastle advanced on the parliamentarian stronghold of Bradford, Fairfax marched out in its defence and the two armies met on Adwalton Moor in Yorkshire.

Newcastle’s pikemen and cavalry carried the day for the royalists, even after it seemed the parliamentarians had gained the upper hand. It was a decisive encounter, granting Charles I control of northern England, which the royalists held for the remainder of the year.

• On the podcast | Mark Stoyle answers the big questions about the Civil War that wracked the British Isles in the middle of the 17th century

As the parliamentarians suffered ever more defeats, they looked north for aid and made a deal with the Scottish covenanters – the covenanters would provide military aid in exchange for the adoption of a Presbyterian form of worship in England, as was in Scotland. The tide of war was turning.

Newbury, 20 September 1643

After successfully lifting a royalist siege on Gloucester, (which had lasted from 10 August to 5 September) parliamentarian commander Robert Devereux attempted a retreat to London, hotly pursued by royalist forces. The Earl Essex’s troops were some of the only parliamentarian forces in the field at the time and they desperately needed supplies. But the royalists had blocked the road to London, and so the two armies, each around 15,000 strong, clashed at Newbury.

After a day of heavy fighting – one the royalists had spent on the back foot, following a surprise dawn assault by the parliamentarians – there was no clear victor and more than 1,000 dead on each side. That night, keenly aware that they were running low on gunpowder, the royalists decided to allow Essex his path east.

He continued his march to London, unmolested, and entered the capital to cheering crowds, while the royalists were left to tend to their wounds with a crushing sense of what could have been. Many historians see this battle as a missed opportunity for Charles to have finished the parliamentarians for good. Another battle was fought near here in October 1644 – though that encounter gave neither side a decisive advantage.

Marston Moor, 2 July 1644

Marston Moor ranked among the largest battles of the Civil War. Prince Rupert’s advance had caused the parliamentary army to break its siege of York and head out to meet the advancing royalist army. The royalists had approximately 17,000 men, while the army made up of parliamentarians and Scottish covenanters was much larger – the combined number on both sides is believed to have been around 46,000.

• Read more | The prince and the devil dog: the strange story of Prince Rupert's poodle 'Boy'

A surprise parliamentarian attack during a thunderstorm destroyed the royal infantry, with fighting lasting just two hours. The commander of the parliamentarian cavalry, which rivalled the royalists, was an up-and-coming military commander who was to make his name on this battlefield: Oliver Cromwell.

Initially, the royalists seemed to have the upper hand, with their cavalry inflicting heavy damage, but as they were vastly outnumbered they were soon overrun. While the parliamentarians reported around 300 casualties, royalist losses were closer to 4,000, with many men taken prisoner.

This defeat not only put an end to royal control of the north – it left the invincible reputation of Prince Rupert and the royalist cavalry in tatters. Cromwell had proven himself an effective military leader and would soon be promoted to second-in-command. After the battle, Rupert gave Cromwell the nickname ‘Ironside’ – a name later bestowed on Cromwell’s cavalry troopers.

Lostwithiel, August and September 1644

When the Earl of Essex ventured into Cornwall, hoping to gain support for the parliamentarian cause, things didn’t go entirely to plan. In August 1644, he was surrounded in Lostwithiel when Charles I joined forces with his nephew, Prince Maurice. There were two stages to the ensuing battle, with the first action taking place on enclosed hills and heath land around Lostwithiel on 21 August 1644, followed by many days of exchanging fire.

On 31 August, the parliamentarians ransacked the town and began to retreat. Essex eventually escaped by sea to Plymouth, and his abandoned subordinates decided the best course of action was to agree terms with the king. With thousands of parliamentarians taken prisoner or dying on the march to Southampton, this was their worst defeat and saw the royalists maintain their hold over the south west for the rest of the war.

Naseby, 14 June 1645

In retaliation for the royalist sacking of Leicester on 31 May 1645, parliamentarian commander Sir Thomas Fairfax was ordered to lift his own siege of royalist Oxford and ride out to meet the king. The armies fought on 14 June, near the Northamptonshire village of Naseby.

When the armies could eventually find each other through the fog, the battle quickly descended into fierce hand-to-hand combat. Prince Rupert and his horsemen chased away part of the parliamentarian cavalry; on the other side of the battlefield Cromwell defeated the royalist cavalry, and then attacked the flank of the royalist infantry, which had been defeating its parliamentary counterparts.

• Read more | Oliver Cromwell: the secret of his military genius

The nascent New Model Army had shown off its discipline to great effect. The royalists’ chances of winning the battle were few: with most of their best officers killed, they never managed to form an army of such comparable quality again. The royalists suffered nearly 1,000 losses, while the parliamentarians claimed just around 150.

Most concerning for Charles I was the capture of evidence that proved he was attempting to get help from Catholics in Ireland and across Europe, fuelling anger among England’s Protestants and seeming to justify the morality of the war. Within a few months, royalist resistance across England had been defeated. The king would eventually flee his Oxford base, disguised as a servant, after it was besieged and ultimately surrender to the Scots at Newark, in 1646.

Kilsyth, 15 August 1645

Kilsyth, in North Lanarkshire, would play host to the largest battle in Scotland during the Civil War. An alliance of parliamentarians and Scottish covenanters faced royalist Scottish troops commanded by the Marquis of Montrose. Before either commander had given an order, fighting broke out and more and more soldiers joined in.

The parliamentary and covenanter army made a run for it when it was clear they could not win, and almost two-thirds of their men were killed. Montrose celebrated his victory, but quickly realised it had all been in vain after hearing of the royalist defeat at Naseby. He attempted to call a parliament in Glasgow in the name of the king but failed. This was to be Montrose’s last great battle: he was hanged in 1650 by the Scottish parliament as a traitor after fighting on the side of Charles II.

Preston, 17-19 August 1648

In 1647, some of the Scottish nobility had agreed to fight for Charles I in what was known as the Engagement. In exchange, they demanded that Presbyterianism be introduced in England – Charles agreed to a trial period of three years.

Did you know?

Fatality statistics

About 3.6 per cent of England’s population died in the Civil War, as a result of fighting, disease and accidents. This is a higher percentage than in the First World War, which saw 2.6 per cent of the population perish.

A second civil war had been ignited. In what is considered to be one of its bloodiest battles, the parliamentarians took on their former allies between 17-19 August 1648. Although greater in number, the Scots were poorly equipped and fled the boggy battlefield, surrendering to Cromwell at Warrington on 19 August.

The New Model Army had won another decisive victory, a resounding final blow for the royalist cause that put an end to the second civil war. In the aftermath, thousands of royalist prisoners were sent for servile labour in the New World.

This article was first published in the January 2021 issue of BBC History Revealed

]]> Jonny Wilkes <![CDATA[8 reasons why the Civil War broke out]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-civil-war-broke-out-reasons-causes/ 2024-05-31T15:45:08.000Z 2023-06-12T07:31:39.000Z  

The divine right of kings

Charles I had a fractious relationship with Parliament from the beginning of his reign, in 1625, not helped by his zealous belief in the ‘divine right of kings’. Like his father James VI and I, Charles considered himself answerable only to God and so subject to no earthly authority. Such high ideals of royal power made him appear, at least, intransigent and arrogant and, at worse, autocratic.

Tensions mounted as monarch and MPs argued over foreign policy, finances and Charles’s marriage to the Catholic Henrietta Maria. He further angered Parliament when he imposed a tax without their consent to pay for his war with France; then imprisoned without trial those who refused to pay, and implemented martial law and the billeting of troops.

• Read more | Henrietta Maria: Charles I’s warrior queen

In 1628, Parliament issued a Petition of Right, seeking redress to these grievances. The move demonstrates how concerned MPs had grown about the prospect of a king who believed he derived his authority from God holding himself above the rule of law.

Charles I’s Personal Rule

In 1629, Charles dissolved his combative parliament and went on to rule for the next 11 years without one, a period known as the Personal Rule. Being without a parliament to raise taxes actually brought about a period of stability in England as Charles needed to end his costly wars with France and Spain, but he also had to exploit questionable means of making money, such as citing outdated laws to fine gentlemen or selling monopolies.

The most unpopular earner was ‘ship money’, a levy on coastal communities to fund the navy in times of war, which Charles issued multiple times and, from 1635, extended to inland towns. Those who did not pay faced trial, most notably Buckinghamshire landowner and MP John Hampden. The court’s verdict in 1638 favoured the king, but only by seven votes to five, which emboldened opposition to ship money and struck a blow to Charles’s authority.

Religious divisions in England

Of all the policies of Charles’s Personal Rule, the religious reforms caused most alarm. Protestantism was the established religion and Catholics had been persecuted or driven underground since Tudor times. Shortly after his accession, Charles had married a French princess who openly practised her Catholicism, which raised suspicions among the largely Puritan members of parliament.

Concerns were exacerbated as the king, while Protestant, favoured High Anglican worship. Charles enthusiastically supported Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud’s moves to establish a greater sense of ceremony and hierarchy in the Church of England, as well as to re-introduce decoration and finery to worship. This meant railed altars rather than communion tables; stained glass windows and candles; ornamental vestments; and the enforcement of ritual, such as kneeling when receiving the Sacrament – all of which smacked of popery to many Protestants.

• Read more | How people power fuelled England's century of chaos

Laud followed up his reforms with persecution of the Puritans, especially those who criticised him. He had the Puritans William Prynne, John Bastwick and Henry Burton imprisoned during the 1630s for writing pamphlets or giving sermons attacking what they saw as a move towards Catholicism, and had their ears cut off. Prynne’s cheeks were also branded with “S L”, meaning ‘seditious libeller’ – although he reclaimed it to mean ‘Stigmata Laudis’, the ‘marks of Laud’.

Those who opposed the reforms were tried in the Court of High Commission, convened by the king at will and wielding significant power, or the Star Chamber, an arm of the monarchy able to dish out fines and prison sentences. Both became symbols of royal oppression.

Charles’s enemies in Scotland

Charles wished his religious reforms to bring uniformity to the Church north of the border as well as England. But he was met with even more resistance by the mostly Presbyterian (an extreme form of Protestantism) Scots, who believed in a church government of representative assemblies and presbyteries, rather than the rule of bishops.

The catalyst was Charles’s attempt to introduce a new Book of Common Prayer for Scotland, in 1637, which caused a riot when it was first used in St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh – legendarily started when a market-trader named Jenny Geddes threw her stool at the dean.

In 1638, a large number of Scottish nobles and churchmen signed the National Covenant, an agreement affirming their commitment to Presbyterianism, determination to defend the Church of Scotland, or Kirk, and rejection of English governance. Although the document urged loyalty to the king, Charles regarded the Covenant as an unacceptable challenge.

Charles was resolved to crush this national uprising, but his campaign eventually ended in disaster when the Scottish covenanters defeated his army at the battle of Newburn, near Newcastle, on 28 August 1640. The Scots occupied Northumberland and County Durham, forcing Charles to pay £850 a day to stop them advancing further into England.

The Short Parliament

During the Bishops’ Wars, Charles found himself in desperate need of funds for his army and so, in early 1640, he summoned his first parliament for 11 years. It assembled on 13 April, but instead of acquiescing to the king’s request for money, MPs expressed more concern with addressing grievances with the policies from the past decade of Personal Rule.

It soon became clear that they would not support his war, and Charles dissolved the parliament after just three weeks, hence the name ‘Short Parliament’. Charles resumed the war anyway, without parliamentary support, but suffered his decisive loss at Newburn, in August 1640.

The Long Parliament

A humiliated and reluctant Charles had no choice but to call another parliament in 1640 to ensure he had the money to pay off the Scottish Covenanters who were refusing to leave northern England. This so-called ‘Long Parliament’ assembled in November and immediately went on the offensive. Led by the MP for Tavistock, John Pym, one of Parliament’s first acts was to accuse Charles’s much-hated chief minister Thomas Wentworth (the former lord deputy of Ireland and now Earl of Strafford), of high treason and ensure his execution.

The emboldened MPs passed an act ensuring Parliament would meet every three years, even if not summoned by the king, and could not be dissolved without its own consent. They simultaneously abolished the Court of High Commission and Star Chamber, and declared the forms of taxation Charles had been exploiting, such as ship money, illegal.

In November 1641, Parliament passed its ‘Grand Remonstrance’, a list of grievances totalling 204 points detailing their opposition to Charles’s policies during his entire reign. Not all MPs, however, agreed with Pym and his allies, especially as they pushed for yet more radical changes, including the abolition of bishops and further curbs on royal power.

• Read more | Has history been unfair to Charles I?

Parliament had become divided – indeed, the Grand Remonstrance had only narrowly passed. Charles gained support from some 148 MPs, who believed the Puritans were going too far or felt they could not go against their divinely anointed monarch. Relations continued to worsen into 1642, when Parliament sent Charles the Nineteen Propositions, a list of demands, among them the need for Parliament to approve the king’s ministers, supervise foreign policy and command the militia; and a reform to church government. When Charles rejected them all, there seemed to be no hope for reconciliation.

The failed arrest of the ‘five members’

On 4 January 1642, Charles launched a drastic, if imprudent, strike against Parliament. Accompanied by around a hundred soldiers, he entered the House of Commons – an unprecedented move, seeing as a monarch had to be invited before going inside – and attempted to arrest five firebrand MPs.

The parliamentary leader John Pym and John Hampden, whose trial for not paying ship money had rallied opposition to the king’s taxes, were among them. The others were: Denzil Holles, a vociferous voice for the bill to abolish bishops; Arthur Haselrig, a major figure in the impeachment of Charles’s chief minister; and William Strode, who had been imprisoned for 11 years for his condemnations of the king’s policies.

Charles asked to use the chair belonging to the Speaker, William Lenthall, before calling out the five names with no response. The Five Members, as they became known, had been warned of the king’s arrival and had just escaped in time. Lenthall kneeled before Charles, but refused to give them up.

“May it please your majesty, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this House is pleased to direct me whose servant I am here,” he said, declaring his allegiance to Parliament. Charles responded with, “I see the birds have flown,” and retreated from the Commons empty handed. Days later, having failed to force the surrender of the Five Members, the king left London with his family.

Ireland in rebellion

Since October 1641, a rebellion had been raging in Ireland – native Irish Catholics against English and Scottish Protestant settlers, many of whom were killed on both sides. Beginning in Ulster, the rebellion was partly born out of Irish fears that, with the Scottish Presbyterians and English Puritans riding high, they would soon force the king to adopt much more intolerantly anti-Catholic policies in Ireland. The rebels even claimed they were acting with Charles’s blessing, which served to fuel the rumours of the king being a secret Catholic.

• On the podcast | Mark Stoyle answers the big questions about the Civil War, the 17th-century conflict between royalists and parliamentarians that wracked the British Isles

In fact, Charles was in rare agreement with Parliament that an army had to be sent to suppress the rebellion, but they disagreed over who should command it. John Pym and his allies in Parliament believed that if the king put himself at the head of the army, he might turn it against them. In the end, some troops were sent across the Irish Channel, both from England and Scotland.

With no cooperation of synchronised tactics, though, the conflict continued for 11 years causing a massive loss of life and devastation in Ireland. Meanwhile, in England itself, both king and Parliament were by now raising armies of their own, and both sides refused to back down.

This article was first published in the January 2021 issue of BBC History Revealed

]]> Professor Mark Stoyle <![CDATA[Crown v Parliament: your guide to the Civil War of the 17th century]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/civil-war-charles-i-oliver-cromwell-timeline/ 2024-05-31T15:45:09.000Z 2023-06-12T06:22:25.000Z How popular was Charles I as monarch before the Civil War?

Charles I certainly had his critics and I wouldn’t say that he was a particularly popular king before the Civil Wars. Charles came to the throne in 1625 and was almost immediately beset with problems – there were the issues with Parliament and MPs’ refusals to grant him money; a whole series of foreign policy disasters, including a new, costly war with France; there was the intense hatred that was felt towards his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham; and there was the suspicion directed against Charles’s Catholic wife, Henrietta Maria.

• Read more | Has history been unfair to Charles I?

So I think in those early years, he certainly wasn’t a popular monarch and he faced quite a lot of hostility. During Charles’s Personal Rule – from 1629-40 – I think you could argue that things got a little better and that the level of hostility towards him receded to a certain extent. But then, of course, everything went wrong again, starting with his waging war with the Scots in 1639 and 1640.

How did Charles’s style of kingship compare to that of his father, James VI and I?

They were very different on the surface, but not so different underneath. James VI and I was very familiar in courtly life and he delighted in drinking, jokes, horseplay and bawdiness. His court was a bit of a free-for-all in a way. Charles was quite shocked by the laxness of his father’s court, and when he became king, he deliberately instituted a new regime.

• Read more | James VI and I: the king who hunted witches

Charles I’s court was much more formal and dignified – the broad humour and practical jokes of his father’s reign went straight out the door. So on the surface, things looked very different. But underneath, Charles’s policies weren’t all that different from James’s and he, too, attempted to pursue a sort of middle-line policy within the church. I actually think a lot of what Charles did as monarch, he learnt at his father’s knee.

As a second son, Charles was never meant to rule. What impact did the death of his brother, Prince Henry, have on him?

One of Charles’s problems was that, as a boy, he was overshadowed by his older brother. Around six years older than Charles, Henry was tall, handsome and glamorous, and he was seen as a sort of Protestant hero. When Henry died, in 1612, the nearly 12-year-old Charles was suddenly pushed into the position of heir to the throne. He was much smaller and not nearly as physically robust as Henry, and he had a bad stutter.

On the face of it, there would have seemed a big contrast between the two princes. I think one of the ways that Charles tried to impose himself in later life was through structures of order, dignity and formality, deliberately adopting a different personal style to that of his late brother and father. I think the type of controlled environment he favoured at court is probably connected to that. So, yes, I do think the loss of his brother did play a very big part in Charles’s life. He was really pushed into a role that he hadn’t been expecting, or probably wanted, to inherit.

How successful was Charles’s marriage to Henrietta Maria?

This is one of the things that’s very poignant about Charles. Initially the marriage, which took place by proxy just a month after he became king, was a disaster. That was partly because Charles had no experience, as far as we know, with girls before his marriage. He was quite shy and when he married Henrietta Maria, she was only 15. So, between them, they had no experience at all, really, with the opposite sex.

There was a lot of external pressure on the pair as well; the marriage had been set up for diplomatic reasons and the French alliance then went horribly wrong. But what is really interesting, I think, is that when Charles was grieving the execution of his close friend and favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, it was Henrietta Maria who became his main source of comfort. From that point onwards, they had an incredibly happy marriage.

Did you know?

A mother’s love

In 1644, Henrietta Maria gave birth to the royal couple’s last child, Henrietta Anne, as her husband’s enemies were closing in. Fifteen days later she was forced to leave her baby and flee to France. It would be two years before she saw her again.

Charles never took mistresses and in the years before the Civil Wars they had nine children together. It always strikes me as sad that Charles’s marriage was probably the best and most successful thing in his life, but, from the point of view of his Protestant countrymen and women, it was this closeness to a Catholic princess that made people suspicious. It was widely suspected that it was Henrietta Maria who was actually calling the shots in the relationship and the country.

How did Charles feel about ruling with Parliament?

I think Charles’s views of Parliament changed over the course of his reign. In 1624, Charles, his father, and the Duke of Buckingham were very keen to push for a war with Spain, and Parliament, which was then pretty xenophobic and certainly anti-Spanish, was delighted with this. So, just before Charles came to the throne, there seems to have been a sort of unity of purpose between the monarchy and MPs.

But as soon as Charles became king and went to Parliament to ask for money to fight the Spanish, they were suddenly not so keen to give him large sums of money for a war. And I think he felt very betrayed by that. From Parliament’s perspective, MPs felt very suspicious of Charles because he had married a French Catholic princess, and they also refused to grant him certain monies. So instantly that created a tension between the king and his MPs, which worsened during the 1620s.

What started as quite a happy relationship rapidly turned sour. In 1629, there was a famous episode where some MPs held the Speaker down in his chair and passed three resolutions against the king’s government. At that point, Charles became really quite frightened of Parliament and started to believe that Parliament was bent on seizing his power.

He certainly thought that it would be a good idea to rule without Parliament for a while, which he did for 11 years. The difficult question to answer is how long Charles intended to rule alone – after all, James VI and I had also ruled without Parliament, for seven years. It may be that Charles would have called Parliament back eventually, even if he hadn’t needed them to grant him money, or he may have decided to rule alone indefinitely. It’s really hard to judge.

What sort of man was Oliver Cromwell?

Oliver Cromwell came from a gentry family in East Anglia, but we don’t know a great deal about his early life. There are hints that he may have had some sort of depression when he was young, possibly because he was worried about whether his soul would be saved or not, and eventually he became a very devout Protestant.

• On the podcast | Ronald Hutton discusses Oliver Cromwell’s early life and career, exploring the brilliance and cruelty of the future Lord Protector

Cromwell was actually a pretty obscure MP at first and nothing close to a leader at the beginning of the Civil Wars. What really brought Cromwell to prominence was military affairs. As soon as war broke out, he threw himself into the parliamentary cause and raised a very strong cavalry unit, known after the 1644 battle of Marston Moor as Cromwell’s Ironsides. He became involved in a whole series of battles, engagements and skirmishes and gradually became more and more successful.

I’d say the crucial turning point for Cromwell’s career was Marston Moor, where he was very successful and managed to spin his military achievements in letters and pamphlets, presenting himself as a key figure in the battle. But what really catapulted him to fame was Parliament’s New Model Army, which was set up in 1645. Cromwell eventually emerged as the lieutenant general of the army’s cavalry.

Was Cromwell really the great military leader he’s often made out to be?

Some of Cromwell’s enemies have argued that he was just lucky, but I think that’s probably a bit harsh. He was certainly determined and industrious, and utterly convinced that he was doing God’s work. Cromwell created a great spirit of camaraderie in the military units that he raised, and his men were obviously very attached to him.

• Read more | Oliver Cromwell: the secret of his military genius

It has been pointed out that Cromwell was lucky in that the parliamentarian forces were so much better supplied than the royalist ones and so his troops were usually quite well paid – certainly much better paid than any of the king’s soldiers – due to the parliamentary hold on London, by far the biggest city in England, seat of trade and a huge source of wealth. As a result of that, Cromwell was able to raise a large cavalry force, which in turn helped him win various encounters.

Timeline: key milestones in the Civil War

28 August 1640

After Charles I tries to impose a new prayer book on his Scottish subjects, they defeat his army at Newburn Ford and occupy Newcastle. In need of funds to pay them off, Charles recalls Parliament.

3 November 1640

The new parliament meets in London. Before voting to give Charles any money, it demands several major constitutional reforms, along with the execution of Strafford – the king’s hated first minister.

23 October 1641

A Catholic rebellion breaks out in Ireland. However, Parliament is unwilling to let the king exercise his traditional right to raise an army to put down the rebellion, fearing that he might also use it against his English subjects.

22 November 1641

The House of Commons narrowly passes its ‘Grand Remonstrance’, listing its numerous grievances with the king and calling for further restrictions on royal power and the authority of bishops.

4 January 1642

Charles further polarises opinion by marching into the Commons and attempting to arrest five prominent MPs.

22 August 1642

Charles raises his standard at Nottingham. Both the royalist and parliamentarian causes begin to assemble forces for battle.

23 September 1642

Royalist forces emerge victorious after a brief skirmish at Powick Bridge near Worcester. It is the opening engagement of the Civil Wars.

23 October 1642

The first major battle is fought at Edgehill in Warwickshire, which results in a draw. Charles heads to London but is unable to take the city. He retires to Oxford, which he makes his new capital.

26 July 1643

Royalist forces led by Charles's nephew, Prince Rupert, seize the port city of Bristol, which has been held by a parliamentary garrison for several months.

25 September 1643

Five days after the royalists lose a key battle at Newbury, Berkshire, Parliament signs the ‘Solemn League and Covenant’ with the Scots. They agree to adopt the Presbyterian form of religion in England in exchange for vital Scottish military aid.

2 July 1644

Assisted by the Scots, Parliament inflicts defeat upon the royalists at the battle of Marston Moor near York. They soon gain control over most of the north of England.

2 September 1644

A disastrous invasion of royalist Cornwall forces the parliamentarians to surrender at the battle of Lostwithiel.

27 October 1644

The second battle of Newbury results in a draw. It is regarded as a disappointing failure by the parliamentarians, who set about reorganising their forces.

February 1645

The New Model Army is formed, giving the parliamentarians a national and professional army capable of turning the tide of the war.

14 June 1645

The New Model Army crushes the royalists at Naseby, a few miles north of Northampton.

10 September 1645

Parliamentarian forces retake Bristol after a brief siege.

5 May 1646

Charles I surrenders to the Scots. The First Civil War soon ends.

11 November 1647

The king escapes captivity and manages to flee to the Isle of Wight. However, he is quickly recaptured and imprisoned in Carisbrooke Castle where he makes plans for further royalist uprisings and a deal with the Scots.

8 July 1648

A Scottish army crosses the border and launches an invasion of England in support of the king. Meanwhile, several royalist risings elsewhere are quashed.

17-19 August 1648

Having made it as far south as Lancashire, the Scottish army is defeated at the battle of Preston. The short-lived Second Civil War is brought to a close.

6 December 1648

Some 186 MPs sympathetic to the king are refused entry to the House of Commons in what becomes known as 'Pride's Purge' – a further 45 are arrested and 86 others leave in protest.

30 January 1649

After having been found guilty of high treason and “other high crimes against the realm of England”, Charles is beheaded at Whitehall.

At what point do you think the Civil Wars became inevitable?

There are two extreme answers to that. The first is that civil war had become pretty much inevitable a century or so earlier, when Henry VIII pushed through his sort of half-cock reform of the Church in the 1530s; he had broken away from Rome, but he hadn’t set a full Protestant church in its place. You could say from then onwards, England had been destabilised in religious terms and that there was always likely to be a final reckoning between conservative and radical Protestants.

• Read more | What sparked the Civil Wars?

The second more extreme view is that war wasn’t inevitable until literally the morning of the battle of Edgehill, in October 1642. It’s sometimes said that if Charles had suddenly died the night before the battle, both sides might still have been able to pull back from the brink of war at that point.

Those are the extreme views. If you’re asking when did war become very likely, I would say it’s after Charles’s attempt to arrest five MPs in January 1642, after which he was forced to abandon London. At that point, you had the two opposing sides physically drawing apart.

How were the Civil Wars viewed at home and abroad?

Like most wars, lots of people were horrified from the start and most didn’t want a war at all. There were some people, particularly young men, who were quite excited by the prospect of a war and at first, there were lots of volunteers for both king and Parliament; the armies both sides raised in 1642 were largely made up of volunteers.

• Read more | 10 great misconceptions of the Civil Wars

I think that was a point where, much like in the First World War, everyone thought the war would be over by Christmas. But when it became clear after the first battle that the war was going to drag on, more and more men desperately tried to avoid fighting and both sides eventually had to conscript men to join them.

In terms of how the conflict was viewed abroad, I think there was initially a feeling of amazement and shock at what was going on, because England had mostly seemed a stable polity. For many foreign powers it was obviously useful that England was engaged in a war within itself and that the English navy, which had been quite powerful in European waters, was suddenly inward looking again. But there was actually very little real foreign intervention in the Civil Wars.

This article was first published in the January 2021 issue of BBC History Revealed

]]>